skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'd need to see some stats and studies that show wide-scale differences in code quality.

There's a good reason why offshore contractors have code of generally lower quality. Here's what a Chinese friend has told me about the employment situation for coders in China. The good programmers usually get good jobs at local firms--most of which don't do outsourcing. The outsourcing positions are primarily taken by the lower-quality programmers.

Thus, when you outsource to China, you're often effectively self-selecting the worst programmers to work on your project. This leads to stereotypes that Chinese programmers are incompetent idiots, when in fact the reality is just that bad Chinese programmers are incompetent idiots, no different than bad Western programmers.

Obviously I have no statistics on this, but I'm inclined to at least somewhat trust the word of someone who has lived there and had experience with the industry. It's also a better explanation than "Chinese are bad programmers" or some equally racist answer.
Everyone complaining about all the non-programming topics on HN, upvote this article, because it is the real deal. A deep, deep dive into a little-known technical aspect of a language many of us use every day.
Except in NKOS-land, Wolfram has copyright on all the numbers that you might possibly ever generate...
Queue ICPC Challenge
Yes, multiple of the stringed variety.
Um, no.

Wow. This is simply an extreme over-generalization of a single use-case being applied to entire industries. The author of the article is also a VC with a vested interest in 'apps'. Shocker.

Nice press-hack Mr. Wilson, but present-day facts and digital computing history are not in your favor.

Moore's law and Gilder's law illustrate that a democratization of hardware and connectivity outpace the ability of generic software to be written to connect them.

The future is in MORE devices, not less.

Granted, the practical use-cases for "generic devices running task-specific apps" grows as interfaces become standardized and increased portable computing power allows for more near real-time workflows from non-dedicated real-time hardware. All modern TVs and Set-top boxes are really powerful computers running "video apps". We are finally arriving at dawn of the "univeral remote", but home media consumption is an extremely small sliver of computing.

Wherever safety, security, and low-attention/muscle-memory/real-time response properties dominate the workflow, a task-specific combination of hardware & software (e.g. a Device) works better. And those devices are getting cheaper and cheaper to produce every day.

For example, look at the large variety of input and monitoring Devices which come coupled with household products (stereos, garage door openers, cars, hot tubs, baby monitors, etc.).

Further from home, Internet routers used to simply be generic Unix boxes. Now routers run their own hardware platforms and dedicated operating systems. The same applies to industrial welding/manipulation robots.

Input used to come exclusively from serial line keyboard terminals. Now a whole range of dedicated input Devices (mice, trackpads, haptic probes, eye-trackers, isometric sticks) and their respective software drivers, provide the vast bulk of user input data.

People aren't going to trust the safety and security of their health, homes, cars, or children to the latest v2.1 update in the App store, but they'll (somewhat unhappily) wait on the latest firmware update while their Scientific Atlanta cable box reboots.
There are millions of programmers in India. Saying "Don't outsource to India, your project will be late and bug ridden" is like saying "Don't go to America, you'll be attacked by a bear".
Heh, my wife and I bring in a lot more than the average middle class family. But I still consider $30k a luxury, especially for a car that'll have trouble getting you from here to sf and back.
Another one here. But I'd love to have a cofounder that could bring something else to the table.

Maybe we should start a list of companies interested in finding cofounders?
Fork-per-connection (sequential) is simple and pretty fast, but it does have its limits (it works fine for a simple webapp, but writing a high-performance IRC server that way will be rather painful.)

Once you need more than fork-per-connection can easily provide, you're not doing sequential code, you're doing events and/or threads. "Threads suck" is a common theme lately, but both can be pretty complex. (Event-based code obscures control flow, as you note; threaded code is subject to very subtle and hard-to-reproduce bugs.)
Perhaps I should have used a more hyperbolic title. :)
JMD, Markdown and a Brief Overview of Parsing and Compilers ~ C for Coding
All modern tvs and set top boxes are the farthest thing from "really powerful computers". They're actually the exact opposite of being powerful computers.
The study's rather useless. How well does the study account for better or changed diagnosis methods? Or whether students simply find it more culturally acceptable to report mental problems? The reporter barely gives recognition to the fact that there /might/ be inaccuracies with the data.
Berkshire Hathaway/Warren Buffett. (Though the name at first was not BH)
AIG Had An Off-Balance Sheet Stash Of Billions In Bonds
Even that is a bit dishonest. I'm not 'dear' to my bank.
Nothing wrong with being a single founder, a 1 founder business with 40K in profit is already ramen profitable. A 2-3 founder business with 40K in profit is not.
Curtiss P AisleFinder.com
I think "Valued Customer" is exceedingly, even bluntly, honest. I AM a valued customer - valued to an exact dollar amount.

In this case, the weasel word ends up saying the truth.
A bit of violin, a bit of guitar.
I absolutely agree. A fact which further proves my point.

The comparison was being made to previous generations of digital TVs and set top boxes, not to generic home PCs or laptops. Similarly, look at the evolution of dedicated game consoles.
The futility of cross-country comparisons
I can't decide if I like it or not, but one commenter really takes the opportunity to promote his website:

> I believe "crowdsourcing" is the future of how we'll tap into and retrieve much of the information we desire, in real-time. We designed our entire web site/application (liveskiconditions.com) around the fact that people want to know the current snow conditions [...].

Spam or not?
"anyone with physical access to your PC" if that's the criterion, none of the proposed remedies really help. Someone with physical access to your machine or the ability to run privileged code will very likely get your passwords despite the quality of your Firefox master password.
Me too! And some drums, but not proficiently.
Insights That Helped FreshBooks Become A Successful Paid Web App
Really, weasel words can be kind of a gift. The company is unintentionally telling me what kind of people they are. If they can't be bothered to clearly state what they do and why they're great at it, they're telling me that I don't want to work with them.
Google News Pulls The AP’s Content As Contract Comes Up For Renewal
Gift Cards and Employee Retail Theft
Actually, speaking of running something over with a tank, this hard drive did pretty well:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8449893.stm
Awful singer, good dancer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pube5Aynsls
Very true, specially monitoring the monitors :)
They need to make this work, otherwise they'll never be able to catch up to the Android's, iPhone's and Maemo's of the smartphone world, let alone trying to persuade "smartbook" manufacturers to use WinMo7+ instead of some Linux variant...

I actually think it'll just be a long, uphill battle.
He didn't say that and no it's not.
I would hope most people here would realize that if you click "save password" then your password is, well, saved...

Oh also, someone with physical access could just as well install a keylogger. It's a pretty difficult threat to guard against.
It can work out, but it's a long road.
http://blog.afterthedeadline.com/2009/09/08/after-the-deadli...
Please, that's just a suburban legend. snort
We're talking about two sets of twin primes, each part of the social security number being in each set. I'm sorry I didn't make it clear in the OP.
Do the guitar and drums for Rock Band count?
To some extent things are technology-limited now. Not many people are going to build a 45nm process in their garage.
It depresses me that this drivel gets upvoted.
Most are a portrait of a certain kind of person that one wants to avoid (and especially, avoid being).
I still prefer schemes without any kind of software for my passwords... Something like that:

http://blog.sucuri.net/2009/10/password-security-without-pas...

A javascript app for that would be good, btw :)
I've pissed off my girlfriend several times by reading a book she recommends, and instantly predicting exactly what the "twist" at the end is. Comes from being a lonely nerd with nothing much to do but read tons and tons of science fiction.
> Not blocking the entire PHP process while waiting for database results, waiting for a file to download, waiting for memcached to respond, etc.

The thing is, I need those database results -- I can't do anything else until I have them. I received a single request from the user and I'm spitting out a single HTML response back. That's what PHP is all about. And mulithreading as optimization itself wouldn't improve performance because I'd be taking away CPU from other requests that are running concurrently.

> Web apps would use a lot less memory (and hardware) if people were not so afraid of threads.

Fundamentally I don't disagree; there's a lot of cool work going with event-based web servers. However, I think those designs are great for very specific tasks like chat servers and but require too much fiddling when doing traditional stateless web work. However, it may indeed be the future.
Yes. Electric guitar and bass.
Wow, that's actually great. Thanks for the info.
I'm a single founder, done all the work in product development, marketing, and sales. It's not bad at all.
While I do understand and agree that the initial stages of a startup are about Product Discovery, what I would like to understand more is when startups realize that they have hit the right product. Like what metrics can be considered as an indicator that your product is finally converging towards a point where a signinficant chunk of your target audience will find it useful and use it
Well, it depends. Your average European will probably need to travel shorter distances. 80 miles would probably be enough for my parents for maybe 330 days in the year. That’s not bad at all. But you are probably right that this pesky month when you really need to drive farther and really don’t have any time to wait for the battery to recharge will kill it.

And buying a second car for $30,000 is probably a bit too much. I guess that all goes to show that some sort of way to just change batteries (and not charge them when driving long distances) really would be a good idea.

(Psst, we are on the internet. Didn’t know if you noticed. I have no freaking idea where your “here” is :)
I'm a single founder: by circumstance of location, self-funding, age, and family. I do understand why investors prioritize investment into startups with co-founders. I suppose if I was splashing money around, I'd do the same.

I have been through enough to learn to engineer my startup plans to the resources I have.
Profit for taxpayers
Why Anti-Elite Era?
Google redefines the whole mass application market.

Microsoft is a victim. Intentional or not.
usual software bugs: One that the developer can't fix and will blame the user for that :)
bandcamp is the best music selling/hosting app. Just had to say it...
http://dagniel.bandcamp.com/ (french-canadian)

In this order : bass, guitar, drums, piano.
Neural Nets Hallucinate Communally on Electronic Psychedelics
> * our time is precious, we'd rather not do it ourselves.

This is the simple reason why the majority of people buy things. Why does 99% of the population go out and buy their fish rather than go down to a stream with a rod and a tub of worms?

I don't have the skills and resources (IE time) to either code my own webapps or to rely on open-source tools, despite how much I would like to. So when I have the option of, if something goes wrong, saying "Hey, I paid you, what-the-hell?!" I don't take this approach with computer maintenance and networking as I can handle that in my sleep, I can't handle my server-monitoring worth a damn. As I'm not up-to-date on any open-source server-monitoring tools, I'm always going to be at a loss if I try to set it up and don't care to keep up to date.

Similar questions can be asked as to why HN users, who are likely more pro-organic than the regular population are paying for something that is free and easy to do. I've grown organic, pesticide & fertilizer free herbs and vegetables, so why doesn't everyone else? Because to me it seems as simple as pushing a seed into soil, but I know people who have difficulty in keeping a cactus alive and would by far prefer paying for their organics.
How I started my company is kind of funny. While talking to my friend, I had this idea I thought was great. I tried to sell it to him and asked him to develop it, but his heart was in doing another project, his own idea. I told him, it's not hard at all; let me show you. He was still not interested. I proceeded to do a design and built a prototype. One thing led to another, it became my product and my company.
You can take a domestic contractor to court if they sabotage the project after you fire them.
How will textbook publishers react to this?

Will they:
1) Publish new editions more frequently?
2) License the books to rental companies instead of selling them (maybe they already do this, I don't know)?
3) Require a cut from each rental?
3 to 4.3 Billion Barrels of Recoverable Oil in ND/MT
Cool :)

Just a minor nitpick: you may want to try the library method bmp.find_color() instead of your find_init_color() (http://msanders.github.com/autopy/documentation/api-referenc...), it should be significantly faster.

Also, instead of iterating through the width & height manually, autopy offers this shortcut:

for x, y in bitmap:
do_something(bitmap, x, y)
What should they say? (disregarding that prepending a salutation of "Dear" is a matter of English etiquette, and some customers may be offended if you do not include it.)
Open Source Furniture by Ronen Kadushin
Mike Pall's post is here: http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.lua.general/61259

Unfortunately, it was mostly flame.
Am I the only one on a classical instrument? I've played trombone since 4th grade (currently a senior in college).
Secure yourself by using secure habits (like locking your screen when you're away) and using strong passwords and then storing them somewhere.

A determined attacker with physical access to your system is basically impossible to stop. There are a myriad of ways they can figure out your password or log your keystrokes or memory to find it.

I feel that the real value in passwords is in securing network communications. In that case you simply need to be sure the protocol is secure and does not send the password over the wire (or air) in plain text or an easily extractable format.

The chance of someone trying to brute force your online accounts or sniffing your network traffic is much more likely than someone sneaking into your office and booting your desktop from a live CD. So I would rather have a very strong network password and a reasonably weak password manager passwords than not store my passwords and thus feel the pressure to make my online passwords easy to remember.
I have also just discovered what looks like at least a billion barrels of oil below my left thumb's nail.
Goals for 2010
That's the single founder spirit :-)
And this is a solved problem: if you don't want people analyzing your preference files and/or caches, put at least one layer of encryption between the two. All modern OSes support encrypting your home directory, and most of them also support encrypting your hard drive in its entirety. In either case, physical access becomes pretty useless.
Check back in a couple million years, and maybe it will have evolved chloroplast production. But this seems unlikely to happen, given how advantageous it would be and how much time it's had to evolve without it happening yet.
It's nice to see an analysis that looks at more than just CPU. Disk I/O can be very important in some cases.

It's also nice to see the tests being done over a period of time, rather than a single day.
Violin, wanted to go pro when I was a teen.
echo “qwerty http://www.facebook.com” | md5

That will appear in plain text in your terminal history file. And, if you are on a multi-user machine, even non-privileged users will be able to see your command line.

You should never put any password or private key on a command line (any command line, not just in your terminal). Instead, use the unix-standard getpass function or it's equivalent in your language/library of choice.
violin -- http://nato.cc/
Charlie Munger helped out Warren a lot. Not sure at what point their partnership started -- but it was before Buffet was making a ton of money.
In order of proficiency: Bass, guitar, drums ..... voice
I'm currently working on a long article about home theater pcs actually. should be on HN tonight. would love to get your feedback on it in the comments section here.
Crank curmudgeon review: Loses big points for including illegibly down-filtered graphs in the page. Either make them readable or make them links. Using fancy animations isn't an excuse for including 600x266 pixel unreadable blotches in your document.
It would be nice to see a table with HN members and their startups next to them. Does anything like this exist?
> you're subtly begging the question.

You are the first person to correctly use the phrase "beg the question" in something I've read in the last three weeks.

Congratulations!
Sounds like great negotiating tactics even if a little heavy handed. Really; just imagine the value of the visitors from google and other search channels is to the AP.
We suspect that neither Mr. Cameron nor 20th Century Fox (a sister company to this newspaper) had any idea of the effect their movie would have on the other side of the world.

While Cameron probably did not predict that exact scenario, I find it hard to believe that he did not see the parallels between the film he created and what's happening right now all over the world as first-world countries continue to exploit the third-world at the expense of those living in it.

In this situation it's only slightly different as the conflict is within the country itself. It's not surprising the film resonates strongly with those humans who find themselves in the same shoes as the Na'vi.

See: "The real Avatar story: indigenous people fight to save their forest homes from corporate exploitation"

http://news.mongabay.com/2009/1222-hance_avatar.html
"Trying to learn to hack on a Microsoft Windows machine or under any other closed-source system is like trying to learn to dance while wearing a body cast."

Total fucking bullshit.
Dear Apple: What we want to see for iPhone 4.0, part 1
Tell HN: Hiring .NET hacker in Valencia, CA
If you'd like to work for a financially stable company yet be part of a small dev team that cranks out several new apps a year, we'd love to talk to you. Our company recognizes and rewards excellence. If you love to crank out well-built apps in ASP.NET or Silverlight that users love, we want you. Not looking for corporate drone types.
Interesting. I was going to come in here and ask if this advice was good for me to follow as a long-format fiction writer--but you seem to have answered that.
If you count early employees as co-founders, then fine (that's probably why you wrote "de facto").

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/7.03/bezos_pr.html

"Over blueberry pancakes at the Sash Mill Cafe in Santa Cruz, Bezos managed to convince one of them, Shel Kaphan, to become employee number one."
This is a bit unrelated, however I once heard a quote regarding co-founders:

"Even when there are multiple founders, somebody is in charge"

Co-founders don't necessarily mean "equals." You can have co-founders that are less involved than yourself (still giving you the value of a co-founder, without requiring them to be equally as invested as yourself).

Another thing to think about is ownership of the idea- almost by definition, the person who comes up with the idea will be the most involved. If you're looking for a co-founder, it will be much easier if you don't yet have an idea, and come up with one together.
Vote for Barbie to be a computer engineer (Encourage diversity)
All the graphs have links to full size versions and the size in the article itself is dictated by the site (since the side bar is clearly mandatory) So I don't quite no what your problem is.
Host Gator Domain/Hosting PROMO - Free Package
I think that's a bit rough to be honest. I'm no fan of the corporate speak that has one browsing a site trying to work out exactly what it is the company really does (How do I install it? Do they host it? Does it go on my laptop or my phone? Can I afford it? ) but that copy is probably written by a small company trying to look bigger than they are (most entrepreneurs or freelancers can identify with that) or a mid-range marketing staffer not wanting to gamble on casual copy that might seem alien to the boss or customers.

I don't like it, but I can see how it comes to be.

A friend sent me a link yesterday to a site, some product or service that McDonalds were using. I browsed a few pages, skimmed the text, and had no idea what was even being sold - security software, social network, messaging system, it wasn't immediately obvious.
Your second point (monitoring of your monitoring tools) is a very key point for this particular example. I've seen many people through together a quick install of WhatsUP or Nagios or whatever, then get caught with their pants down months later when they find their monitoring server's been down for days and they didn't know it.
Cheap computers will obviate computer theft
I was wondering why the text read a great deal like a VNR (video new release).

The analysis may be "independent", but the fine print at the bottom of the article indicates that it was paid for by Rackspace.
You would at least justify it with your anecdote.
> I'm tempted to ask everyone who has been affected by PayPal's "security measures" (a frozen account) to write a post and submit it to a blog.

I'm tempted to ask everyone who has _not_ been affected to do the same. Except that there are millions upon millions of them. I've used PayPal for years. I remember using eBay before PayPal. A morass of checks waiting to clear the bank and other nasty confusion was horrible.

To the original article: if you're running a business, just like with your computers, never have _any_ single point of failure. Including payment processors.
"Having our passwords in plaintext is more secure than obfuscating them precisely because, when a user is not misled by a false sense of security, he is likely to use the software in a more secure manner."

I'm sorry but this is bullshit. The reason for the (admittedly weak) obfuscation is to keep out the casual snooper, e.g. your little brother or sister who shares the family computer. It's not meant to keep out a skilled cracker, nor to protect those savvy enough to think about these issues.

Why do we geeks tend to only think about things from our perspective? I think we should coin a phrase for it. Maybe the myth of the "sufficiently smart user".
I've actually been seriously thinking about that. Not sure how long that would take, but I'm definitely open to the idea.