skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You're right this type of coding doesn't work well in maintenance. However, when exploring a problem, fast coding is phenomenal. Once I discovered I could write code quick enough to do experiments, and that the whole iteration took less time than reasoning out, planning, doing back of the napkin style calculations, and still maybe getting it wrong, I moved to exploratory programming. This is where fast coding shines. Further, a lot of infrastructure can be built up this way, helper functions, I/O frameworks, etc can get massaged into a good solution.

At the end, there is still refactoring, and maintenance (particularly by people not intimately familiar w/ the codebae) may need some more thought, but the initial build... fast is good.
Any time we do quality work we are deeply satisfied with it. Whether it is writing code, fixing a car or cooking, when done well it makes us happy. Good, quality work is always unmistakable.

Most people don't even get to do that. They're expected to "get it done" within deadlines, constraints, and business decisions that make mediocre or even shitty work the best that's possible.

People would be much happier and more productive if they had the resources, support, and (by far, most importantly) creative freedom necessary to do excellent work, but the reality of the business world is that most people don't.
Firefox for mobile 'days away' from launch
Yes, Google bought Android Inc. a few years ago; it's not news.
Yes! That is the kind of speed and skill to which I was referring. The ability to use code as a medium for thought and exploration rather than just viewing it as a final product.
Second system effect, yes.

Contrast to Quake, which succeeded under similar circumstances despite deep difficulty. A follow-up to the most successful game of the time, by a team with lots of money to burn. The original announcements described it as almost a prototypical world-of-warcraft type role-playing game, until it morphed back into something more like Doom.

The result was uneven - a weird mix of fantasy castles and sci-fi fortresses speaks to the divisions on the design team - but at least they shipped, unlike DNF, and the end result was fun, unlike Daikatana.
Hi,
i created an account hnlogin / hnlogin
if you do not feel like signing up.

i will think about what interactions there can be without signing up.
FYI you linked to blueprint CSS as "Google BluePrint CSS & Resets". Blueprint CSS is not by Google, it was just hosted on Google Code like many other open source projects. See http://www.blueprintcss.org/
>Wow, and here I was thinking it was a form of government.

Like most ideologies, the term "communism" is gooshy enough to mean whatever you want it to mean - but at heart, communism is concerned with the matter of who owns and controls the means of production. It's a form of government insofar as the decision on who gets to control the means of production is ultimately a political decision.

Communists believe the people should own and control the means of production - but every real-world implementation has used government as a proxy for people.

I suppose it's possible to run a communist society via direct democracy on a very small, local scale; but good luck trying to scale that up to the national or even regional level. At some level you need to adopt some kind of more or less representative government. In the case of communism, the track record is definitely skewed toward the "less" end of the representation spectrum.

In other words, your claim:

>A true communistic government has never even been tried...

is a straightforward No True Scotsman fallacy. It's no different from "real" conservatives distancing themselves from the Bush administration because the implementation of their political system ended up violating most of its ostensible core values.

If you can't implement an ideology without discarding the very principles that define the ideology, it's a broken ideology.
Also that they refuse to experiment by trying out ideas which may or may not work. Instead, they bang their heads and don't type a lick until they have found what they regard as "the" solution. Which is often not even "a" solution, but because they haven't been coding their ideas as they go, they have no way of finding that out until they slowly and painfully implement their idea and it doesn't work.
Very clear write up on WebSockets in general and Ruby/EventMachine in particular. Loved the examples!
Completely true, but it's also worth noting that Tapulous' current market position is a result of some elegant pivots. Tap Tap Revolution was just one of many many apps they were working on in the early days. Once it started taking off they were smart enough to recognize an opportunity and convert that to a very solid business. Therefore it's a bit misleading to consider it a one-app success story, because there was so much more done behind the scenes.
Match.com doesn't have a problem with its matching algorithm as it does with the fact that - like the author - there are more fake profiles on it than real ones, and not all of those were made by third parties.

It's a site best avoided.
This is like asking an un-experienced driver to drive fast. Or an un-exprerience scuba diver to go deeper.

I remember that I didn't code fast in my CS1 classes. The reason was because it was scary. The compiler and all syntax errors seemed cryptic.

Now one of the goals of the class should be to make students not afraid of trying things out. To get there they have to understand the tools and the basics.

Having a good langauge + compiler/interpreter definetly helps. For example, Python's REPL is a way to try things fast. Especially when used with something like ipython, where you can explore an object's methods as you type.

C/C++ and gcc is not so great in this respect. You get a segementation fault, and the next thing you do is pepper code with print statements or fire up gdb. Now they have another problem to solve -- how to use gdb. Very useful, but perhaps not for someone in CS1, unless CS1 as a filter and its purpose is to scare everyone away.
Non-linkjacked: http://blog.stephenhorlander.com/2009/12/21/windows-themeui-... (which I submitted earlier: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1007484)
They don’t really. If you’re browser checking your build then you should uncover any inconsistencies that your actual stylesheet hasn’t covered. Once you’ve fixed those then you have no need for the reset stylesheet in the first place.
Hi Matt! No worries. Thanks for posting this to HN! It's always nice to feel like I am not just shouting into the void, but it feels too self-promoting and vaguely spammy to post my own stuff. So I've been very glad that people (both here and on Facebook - I must figure out how to unify comments) have found this interesting.
The problem with that from a support point of view is that there are a lot more things that can go wrong with a computer than a pair of shoes. Also it costs a lot more to do something like send the customer a new product under suspicious circumstances just to keep them happy and loyal. While PCs can be considered commodity at this point, the wholesale cost is still more than the wholesale cost of a pair of shoes.

Update: Not to mention that I doubt that Zappos has to custom-build shoes (and the labor costs associated with that), though I've never done business with Zappos so I can't say that definitively.
This is a well-targeted advertisement. Too bad they couldn't find some real use for such a box, e.g. A handy dock station for the phone.
Right, but it is significant in a discussion of what one app has the potential to make in Apple's App Store.
"I'm pushing towards the idea of internalizing not only the specifics of a language, but the idea of what programming language and tool fits a problem best at any given time."

I've found that anytime something seems crufty, or perhaps like I'm twisting too many rules, or just plain inelegant, I think "there has to be a better way to do this" and its off to the google/documentation/greybeards. If you don't get that feeling yet (it will come) any time something seems hard, explore other people's solutions -- that is more than one, and compare/contrast them on a detailed level. Eventually you'll either start just understanding what the best tool is, or more likely, intuitively knowing that you don't know a good solution and that its time to search. (It's a big field, knowing when you don't know is a good place to be).
This is due in part to the popularity of the Sapir-Worf hypothesis: if you learn to speak Klingon, you'll learn to think like a Klingon. :)
A redis backend for riak
I don't see the analogy.

People use quite simple tools for complex interactions with other human beings (e.g. facebook). Someone interested in research may use quite simple tools like evince to view the latest research papers.
It Just a Watch, So let it be pocket friendly
AtD - Contextual Spell and Grammar Checker @ Washington DC PHP Meeting
I guess you're correct, but it just feels better to me knowing I'm working from a clean slate, then accepting whatever padding, line spacing, font size, and margins that browser though would look nice.

I found that my CSS skills really improved when I added a style reset and was forced to contemplate all the styles which were previously given to me without consideration by the browser.
This makes me think that the advice about 50/50 cofounders -- that you want somebody who complements you, not somebody like you -- is especially good.

If you're the tech guy and the other guy is the business guy, you have a conflict-resolution method in place for most things. You have final say on tech, he has final say on business. So you'd expect the difficult/troublesome decisions to be the ones where you've got equal say, like "do we sell for this amount of money?"
It applies to all levels, actually. Seniors have this problem too, not just CS1 students.
Silence does not clutter the channel. Thus only breaking silence needs justification.
Thanks for the link, I didn't see it the first time around
Looks good based on the gameplay video here:

http://www.positech.co.uk/gratuitousspacebattles/

(scroll down)

I just wish there was a Mac version :( I'd buy it.
Why Rebol is the most Misunderstood Language and Not Javascript anymore
I will inspire from Douglas Crockford, who told that Rebol had been part of JSON inspiration and who has written in the past this famous article on Javascript: Why Javascript is the most misunderstoo language, since Javascript has now won a huge gain in respect, the most misunderstood language is now Rebol. Is it for the same reasons ?
I'm looking at it now, but I'm not sure what some of these things mean.

Your photo priority is 2 and you have 9 credits.

What does photo priority mean? What can I do with the credits?

What is your target audience for this? The verbiage is very technical across all of the pages, and I couldn't see anyone who wasn't technical really understand what's going on.

The voting functionality works all the ways I would expect it to - the buttons at the bottom of the photos or clicking on the photo I liked best both worked. The keyboard interface was a nice touch. It's clear that you've spent a lot of time thinking about how the voting would work.

I did have some problems with the navigation. It didn't feel very well considered, and I didn't like having to go back to the front page in order to get back to the main menu options. It would have been nice to have a navigation bar somewhere that would let me jump to all of the major sections.
Spring 3.0 is now available
Thought this would be worthy of mention. I find the Spring framework to be one of those frameworks that keeps working with java interesting. Any thoughts?
And they added a (simple) coding system on top.
It also makes them a lot more private which is a pretty significant feature in today's social web. The question is how important is that, and to how many people? My bet is the number is growing fast.
You don't have to translate tit for tat what Zappos does. Both businesses are different at a more granular level, but great service is a universal language. I know the guy at the local PC store on a first name basis. Why can't I have that same relationship with my PC vendor and not deal with yet another call center that is overseas?

Why do I have to deal with 100 fucking SKUs at DELL that all have some random numbers? You know how Steve Jobs decided the Mac product lineup? A 2x2 grid: columns for desktop+laptop and rows for consumer+pro. Don't blame Microsoft so much. Blame the OEMs.
Portrait of a Noob
Earn more money to integrate Amazon Associates into your Blogger
Recently Blogger integrates with Amazon, means you have more chance to earn extra revenue by selling Amazon product on your blogger without any hassle.
Attackers Buying Own Data Centers for Botnets, Spam
Bug: "You're submitting too fast. Please slow down. Thanks."
I submitted this as "bugmenot" user too but apparently it was ghosted...

Yesterday I was trying to reply to http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1008720 I always got "You're submitting too fast. Please slow down. Thanks." even though it has been 30 minutes since my last post. I tried again and again over several minutes. Voted on some stories and flagged others in the meantime.

Just now, ~24 hours later it worked again.

PS:Also the site is very slow for me, is that me or the site?
For me an ideal fit would be someone who is like-minded with a constrasting skill set.
What is worth a lot of money? A clean slate and a PC that "just works"?
In the article, the author seems to be switching their use of trailing slashes. At the top, (paraphrasing) it's

rsync -arvuz /src/foo /dest/foo/

but at the bottom it's

rsync -arvuz /src/foo/ /dest/foo

Which is correct?
One way I have found to get around this is to buy from "small business" sections rather than "home" sections. You're far less likely to have to deal with any random 3rd party crap installed when you order from Dell's Small Business area.
More details on the javascript vm: http://my.opera.com/core/blog/2009/02/04/carakan

From my somewhat limited knowledge of such, it seems like they took a fairly similar route as the Webkit guys. (Register based, etc..)
The vast majority of jobs will give you food a roof and a bed.

People start doing the jobs they don't want because they want a large house, two model-of-the-year cars (leased of course), the 40+ inch HD tv, etc etc etc.

Doing what you love is easy to say but most people choose to forgo doing what they love to own (or at least use temporarily) what they want.
He's done a great job of marketing this. I haven't picked it up yet (purchasing addictive games mid-semester is a bad idea), but I keep being reminded about it every few weeks anyway.
How Intelligent Vehicles Will Increase the Capacity of Our Roads
Enveloppen bestellen
Bestel kwalitatieve enveloppen in de webshop van KantoorSupplies. Bekende topmerken aan zeer scherpe prijzen.
I'm wondering if this will make traffic waves travel at the speed of light?
The notion that being 'committed' to open source means that a company should give away everything of value is ludicrous.

I disagree with the statement that Google would be giving away everything by opening up page rank. Google's "secret sauce" is hardly page rank alone. Google is really secretive about this stuff, but they arguably have the world's larges corpus of multilingual text in the form of their html index, coupled with the world's largest fault tolerant compute cluster, the largest repository of scanned text,the largest repository of digital video, and probably the largest repository of digital audio in the world. I'm sure that they also have the world's largest repository of people's surfing and searching habits, along with the one of the largest sets of analytics data.

Even if page rank, map reduce, GFS, etc.. were open sourced I'm sure they'd still find a way to make billions off of the data that they have.

But, I think the larger point that the author makes, is that unlike many giant technology companies (Microsoft, HP, Apple, etc..), Google has made billions off of using open source software. And, while they are a very large supporter of open source, what total percentage of their profits go back to OSS? What percentage of their code gets re-released as open source? These are good questions to ask, and I'd love to hear an open discussion about it.
If you like this kind of thing, you will enjoy Pat Buchanan's Churchill, Hitler, and "The Unnecessary War" and Nicholson Baker's Human Smoke

http://books.google.com/books?id=PYESsQRyIIMC&printsec=f...

http://books.google.com/books?id=8HKQEJlAl9gC&printsec=f...
thanks, its hard to see that as the developer. target audience are people who want to get a rating for their photograph online. my thought is that the ratings u get tend to be very subjective so there might be a need for an objective rating. the nav bar while voting is a great observation, right now one does seem kind of stuck on that page.
That was cute.

I usually find "unboxings" kind of creepy. I like gadgets too, but fetishizing the boxes they come in is weird.
tinychat.com - been there done that
Wow, looks awesome! Thanks for the tip.
> I still find turning off the tight-fisted switch to make strategic investments difficult.

I don't think there's any substitute for experience on this one. The more business decisions I've made, the less I've been concerned that they won't all work out in my favor.

And it's not because I'm playing from a bigger bankroll now. It's because I've learned that losing happens, and it's not the end of the world.
Another good source of information about Thorium:

http://thoriumenergy.blogspot.com/
Though SEO generally does not get a lot of respect here on HN, the article does contain some good observations about where search is heading.
The Next Level of Convergence
Indeed. It would be even better (and noble) if they mentioned Chrome by name somewhere.
_Not_ registering for MobileMe is a benefit unless you are blowing cash on iPhone 3G data plans and really get value from iPhone and Mac data and email sync. For everyone else, its a net loss. me.com's web site is painfully slow (sorry SproutCore, somethings's just not right with this app). I've been working for over a year to migrate away from my mac.com email address so I won't have to renew in a few months.
I read this a while back and i still remember the takeaway point from it :

"It's denser: there's less whitespace and far less commenting. Most of the commenting is in the form of doc-comments for automated API-doc extraction"

This is right on the button. I prefer writing/reading an overall README.txt which says concisely what that module/package etc. is supposed to do and doc-comments where appropriate when something is not obvious. Anything else and i automatically start seeing that as noise filtering it as i go along. The worst are the obvious and/or the outdated ones.
The Firefox menu in the top-left corner looks remarkably similar to the O menu that's appeared in the latest Opera alpha (http://goo.gl/Chfb).

I like the way a lot of the cruft from 1990s Windows applications is starting to disappear from programmes that really don't need it like modern browsers.
Yeah, and where's my pony?
We recently changed our deployment model from an all Capistrano model to a Capistrano plus rsync model. Our old model would take 20 to 45 minutes to update every server in our farm. Our new model updates one staging / deployment server via Capistrano then rsyncs to each of our production nodes. This process normally takes less then a minute and spikes to a few minutes for really large changes. We still have the ability to rollback code and this model is actually quicker at fixing bad deployments then our old model was.

A majority of our time before was spent updating both our codebase then checking external dependencies on each server. Rsync made this process much quicker since these checks are completed once then pushed to each server.
Let me elaborate. Not even Stallman would call for this... What can of totalitarian regime is desired, where businesses (even individuals?) are forced to publish all of their code? Wouldn't it be good enough to do away with patents and copyright? As long as I manage to keep my stuff private, let me (and Google) face the advantages and disadvantages.

Some balance in the force, for Yoda's sake.
The documented PageRank algorithm doesn't have very much to do with how results are actually returned from Google today.
+1 - I use a 30" monitor at work, half the screen is too much. But I'd love to be able to split it into thirds, with the top target area being the middle third.
With Scant Jobs, Grads Make Their Own
No one else gets enough volume :/
""This does not work"? It works for me."

Inheriting money might make someone a millionaire - that doesn't make "Have a rich uncle" a viable financial plan. "Having a rich uncle" therefore "does not work". The same goes for making a simple list of your three goals for the day - for 99% of people, it just doesn't work because your simple plan is most likely going to be blown to hell by some emergency/meeting/new project that just landed on your plate. I believe you when you say that it works for you, but it just doesn't work for the vast majority of people.

" i think you missed the joke about being productive and not achieving anything"

I got the joke - you almost certainly meant that someone who is "being productive and not achieving anything" is engaging in busywork but not doing anything worthwhile, which would mean that they are active (i.e. they are not procrastinating), but they are not properly prioritizing the actions they take. I covered that case explicitly.
http://likebetter.com/
I hired 50 people today. This is what they look like
This is one of Yegge's most stupid rants. I strongly recommend SQLite Dr. Hipp's video presentations on how to write well commented code.
Jeff Jarvis on How Newspapers Can Reinvent Themselves Before It's Too Late
If it was poorly written code, I'd rather see those huge comments just so I knew what was going through the authors head. I think if it's poorly written code with "no" comments, then you have even bigger problems.

I want to say I read that entire article, but I only read the first few paragraphs, so, my comment may be off topic somehow. That was a hefty post!
which parts are so Chromish?

the new Firefox button comes from Microsoft Office.

the space between tabs comes from either Opera or Microsoft Office.

the tabs on top, which is only a possibility at this point, comes from Opera first, but was implemented by Google Chrome down the line.

the use of so much transparency in the menu may come from Microsoft Office or Chrome.

the non-flat buttons can come from Opera or Chrome.

the use of only three buttons on the left, however, comes from Chrome. it should be mentioned that Firefox is playing with the idea of getting rid of a refresh button on the left by building it into the location bar. https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/Projects/3.7_and_4.0_Theme_...

just want to give credit where credit is due.
I don't think this is the criterion you want - if I won the lottery, for example, my to-do list would explode with all the new possibilities presented before me; however, if that happened, I certainly wouldn't consider it a bad day. :)
I completely disagree. The number of problem domains where typing speed is the bottleneck is quite small, and they aren't the interesting problems.

As I spend more time in this business, it becomes clearer and clearer to me that the job of a (senior or above) developer is not to be a typist. It is to assist people in figuring out exactly what their needs are, in a precise sense. Typing the results into a computer is almost incidental.