skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The results may be accurate if you refrain from using any tools, but who programs that way these days? I've had Esc-/ bound to dabbrev-expand in emacs for the past decade.

I think to really get a good idea of the actual keystroke frequency you need to find a sample of the more prolific programmers in each language and ask them to use a keylogger.
Not that I ever plan to use it, but every time I see a list like this I wonder when we'll start seeing similar lists for Microsoft's PowerShell (aka monad).
Possible privacy hole:

What's to prevent someone from acquiring a sample of someone else's DNA and sending it off for you to test?
When I posted this, I didn't realize it was a utilitymill script. I just thought you had done it and posted the results. It's neat though. Thanks.
A Job Quitter's Primer: 25 Reasons To Leave Your Job
> Some smart people started the meme that ideas are less important than execution.

Ideas are less important than execution, but a head start is a big advantage in execution (and adoption).

I like to give away ideas that I'd like to see made into products or services, but that I don't have any interest in implementing myself.
> As far as I can tell, the originators of these ideas are people that betray agendas against the success of Ruby and/or Ruby on Rails.

Says the person who has a vested financial interest in the opposite.
People certainly may post what they're looking at now, but in the past, these have been the solutions:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12010
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=93320
http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/753-ask-37signals-how-do-you-process-credit-cards
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=101340

[This post is a FSQ - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=97491 ]
It's physically impractical to buccal swab someone without their consent.
I'm not trying to diminish the effort spent on building this...but if someone has problems managing their personal relationships, I don't think spending MORE time on a computer will help them.
Please make the + - buttons larger, I found them hard to click on directly.
Hey, I absolutely agree with you. I also think that McDonald's tastes like puke, but they run one hell of a franchise business.
First time synthesis of the complete DNA of a bacterium
That's not dumb, that's a great request.
I'm a sucker for pretty maps.
God, I actually read this. What the hell is wrong with me? I need a life.

...meh

INTERNETS FIGHT!
Chinese is a relatively stable country governed by one Communist party, while Africa is a vast continent with dictatorships, instability, pockets of wealth, religious wars, famine, etc...? Is that the answer?
His statement is still incorrect.
Sorry, poorly written comment.

I was implying that I was going to pretend that my work was the work of 20 people to get people more excited about it.

Maybe a rumor that my company received 100 million in funding would do...
I'm suspicious of your claims in 3. What method are you using? Certainly not RFLP, right? Are you sequencing the gene? A labeled oligonucleotide, targeted toward the deletion?

I'm having a hard time conceiving of a method with zero error rate (either type I or II).
It's fundamental: You are a programmer if you...
You mean the memory stuff?...I forgot what it's called.
From the article, the good:

1. No commute

2. Flexibility

3. Saving money and the environment

4. Increased productivity

The bad:

1. Brainstorming is difficult

2. You never leave work

3. Entropy is after you

I have to agree with most of this. For me working from home turned my commute time into family time. That said I think they missed one significant "bad" thing for larger organizations: less face time means fewer people will think of you, which can affect your likelyhood of moving up.
I just changed the link -- you can now download the spreadsheet at http://www.kopelman.com/Cohort.xls
US scientists close to creating artificial life
I don't think you're going to get a satisfactory answer to a question that involves convincing a management type of the benefits of using Lisp. The point (or at least the way I understand PG's point) is that you can't convince non-technical management types to use Lisp. This becomes a competitive advantage for a startup where management types don't make decisions. It's part of why small startups can beat larger, better funded competitors where managers force everyone to use Java. They get worse developers, less productivity, and take longer to build a worse product. In short, they lose, and the hackers win. You don't have buy into this view to agree that it is, at least, a terrific thesis, and I think YC was started in part to test this thesis.

I should add at this point that I don't know how to code in Lisp. If you ask most programmers what languages they "know how to code in" (never mind if they're experts), Lisp will show up in only a tiny fraction of the answers. Interestingly, you can take this to support or detract from Lisp.

You could say "if nobody's using it by now, it must not be any good." But that reminds me of the joke about the economist who tells his kid not to pick up the $20 bill on the sidewalk, because "if it were real, someone would have already picked it up." Mabye Lisp is the $20 that nobody (or at least very few) believes is real.

Some day, I swear I'll get started. In college (as a math major) I remember talking to a buddy who was majoring in cog sci trying to convince me that Lisp was a great language, and that I really should take a look at it. I was dismissive. If it were so great, why were we using C++ in all my math classes...

-- oh, another thing to add
hiring - will I be able to find talented people to work on the codebase?
A management type probably won't be able to. This option is only available to founders who 1) can do the work themselves, and/or 2) know people who can do the work.

Especially if I am not located in a startup hub.
Again, fairly unlikely. The idea is that the founders are already part of a community of good programmers, so they most likely live in a place where you can find more good programmers
The Speed-up Loop
If MSFT as a company reaches a survival point where they have to release free software, it would be a nice touch for the code to be readable, well-written and nearly bug free.
I could see you selling it to people who have been told they have AIDS, but want to see if they are actually immune and don't need the expensive (around 20,000 a year, last I've heard) medicine.
How to prepare the perfect boiled egg
If it were so great, why were we using C++ in all my math classes...

If MIT had released Macsyma under an open source license, I believe you probably would not have been.
11. Don't ask for overtime ;-)
Unfortunately, it doesn't take into account what IDE was used to write that code. Do I use Tab in Visual Studio 2005? Nope, all that formatting is done for me.
If you ever needed an example of what is wrong w/ all the panel-based demographic and analytics info sites - this is it.

This kind of methodology works fine if you are analyzing a very very large site that many people use (facebook, myspace, etc). It's old thinking to think that a panel of people can accurately measure niche content. It might work for nielsen on TV, but it obviously is completely broken for web sites.
This site doesn't look trustworthy at all. Sorry..but for all I know you guys are just making up the results. Without more information on who you are, or how you do the testing, or some sort of certification from a trusted source, I wouldn't use this service because I don't know if the testing is accurate.
Us old folk didn't have the luxury :)

We had barely adequate course notes, sometimes, and thats the way we liked it!

The technology of today is inspiring in the way it can distribute highly valuable information and education to the masses.
Implementing a Learning Plan to Counter Project Uncertainty
Learning From Failure: Apple's Most Notorious Flops
Ah, that's more like it. :-)
which info?
In the Castro I could see it becoming a huge hit... hell my old hairdresser could probably make a mint pushing these.
How is intellectual property a public good issue? It's easy to, for example, sell a book to a single person, with a contract written to protect the author (from distribution of copies, or whatever).

A public good issue is, say, when you build a dam that helps an entire flood valley, and people living there can get the benefit of your work without paying you, by refusing to agree to any contract with you. I don't see that an author faces that kind of issue.

Enforcing a contract is another matter, and has become very hard for some types of intellectual property, but that is different than a public good problem, in which no one is breaking the law.
I forgot to include explicitly in my anti-23andMe rant that deletions, repeat polymorphisms, and the like were not included in their product's results. Thanks for reminding me :-)
You are a music composer if you...whistle aimlessly.
How do you figure that all of Gates' fortune was built on the back of legislative protection? Microsoft got in legal trouble for bundling IE with windows, for example. Which was the Government working to hurt MS in favor of its competitors.
Yeah, and I'm standing pretty close to the moon too, in relative terms.

But I'm very, very far away from it.
The most important rule when innovating is not to fear failure, and to carry on regardless of it.

Apple has grasped this better than many others in the industry.
185*60 = 10,800 emails a minute
= 648,000 emails an hour
= 15,552,000 emails a day.

Its not too bad
Database gurus slammed for Google post
Books aren't the "problem": digital content is. Digital content is certainly non-rivalrous - if I download a copy of a movie, it's not affecting anyone else's ability to use their own copy. The tricker one is excludability. It's sort of possible with digital goods, but it doesn't work very well, and it appears to be working less well the more people get access to fast connections and lose their qualms about copying things.

It's a tough problem. People like Stallman would like to have the government step in and take charge (if I've understood his position correctly), but I think that's a terrible solution. You could just leave things to "Coasian solutions", which is what a lot of open source software seems to be (the Apache web server, for instance), but you would probably never get stuff like the things Apple produces in that case. Custom software, governed by contracts between two parties, probably wouldn't suffer as much.
Paul Graham Interview from Founders at Work [.pdf]
Bobby Fischer - Obituary
Ask YC:  What do you think of this novel chess-like strategy game?
The game works like this:

* as in chess, each player gets 16 pieces placed in the same two rows on each side on an 8x8 board

* every piece starts out with a "1" on it

* you can think of each "1" piece as a king; once you lose all of your "1" pieces, you lose

* on each turn, you may either move a piece or increase the number on one of your pieces (provided you would still have at least one "1"
piece left)

* a piece with a number k may move up to k steps horizontally or vertically or any combination thereof; every step taken must be on a free square except for the destination, which may contain an opponent piece to be captured

What do you think of this game (e.g., in terms of tactics, strategy, depth, etc.)?
So you deal with your pointy-haired boss by fighting fire with fire. Morally questionable...Although for a sufficiently ignorant management, this would benefit everyone.
OK, I just don't think that the difficulty of enforcing certain legal contracts, should be conflated with a public good problem. It's fundamentally a different kind of issue.

Music downloaders are not free riders. They've broken the law (at least the uploader has clearly broken his contract with the artist not to do this). In a classic public good case, like the flood valley and dam, the difficulty is that people who own property in the valley, and break no laws by continuing to farm there, benefit from the flood control that the dam owner can't prevent from affecting their property.

Which is only a problem because it gives them an incentive to get their neighbors to pay for the dam, while not doing so themselves.
There is no doubting the fact that Adrian loves the color green.. just check out the django site.
@zach,

have you checked zachbaker.com recently? This is what I get:

ActiveRecord::StatementInvalid in Articles#index

Mysql::Error: Table 'zbtypodb.users' doesn't exist: SELECT COUNT(*) FROM users
Thx Josh-- Much appreciated. Absolutely love the blog by the way... Just subscribed.
Hence my point.
Huh, apparently you need 251 Karma. What a non-round milestone.
Sure, good point, but consider that the IP laws that exist in the first place are an attempt to make property out of something where 'property' doesn't really exist in the physical sense. In the case of a book or a song in the era of records, it was a pretty good solution, as enforceable property rights were a pretty good way of encouraging people to produce material that even then could be copied without too much trouble. These days though, that compromise seems to be creaking under the strain of new technology, and is due for a revision.

I'm not sure what the answers are, but I still like the idea of looking at it as a compromise between producers and consumers that should give something to each one. Giving nothing to the producers will discourage production of those kinds of goods. Give too much power to the producers in an age where copying is so easy means using fairly heavy-handed and invasive government power to enforce their rights.
Can a piece move less than K steps? In think so, as you wrote "up to".
Can a piece ever decrease in value? Like every move decreases its value.

Have you modeled this at all? It sounds somewhat fun and interesting, but many times with game development, you don't find the roadblocks and loopholes until you play.
Actually, that was Wilson Miner, who designed both djangoproject.com and everyblock.com.
Yes, it can move fewer than k steps. No, the value never decreases.

I have not modeled it yet, but probably will soon.
Hang on a moment, I need to pick up my jaw that dropped on the floor.
Form tokens are more robust - some people strip referrers (sometimes even at the firewall level) to prevent information leakage from their corporate intranets.
My impression is that this game, played well, would almost always end up in a stalemate. This game has too much symmetry in the powers of pieces; in chess one can attack pawn structures by picking off the pawns at the back since they aren't defended by other pawns, but in this game no such attack would be possible. Consequently, barring gross stupidity I can't see any way that a player could ever capture a piece without losing the piece which he used to attack; so pieces would end up being traded off until each side had only a single piece left.
So, if anyone forgets the original color (which I might do, again) it is ff6600.
This post is inane at best, harmful at worst.

It sounds like: "You know, mediocrity is not so bad."
Startups And The Recession
New tools to bolster a Mac world
Even if you never capture a piece without losing the piece, you have pieces of different importance and "one" piece(s) to protect.
Edward Tufte video presentation on improving iPhone UI
My feelings exactly, except I have little sympathy for the pharmaceutical drug cartels. There are a lot of other examples though.
Heh, one thing at a time dude.
I'm curious about how it handles air-flow/cooling.
Emergency Elisp
Looks like 'ab' is much nicer than back in the day.

But 'ab' only manages a load of 36 tps and is unable to saturate my web server. (identical machines, php+sqlite3 hairy web page) 'http_load' has the same problem. 'openload' can saturate the web server at 135 tps or so.

'ab' does not present a significant load on its host, so I'm not sure why it can't drive the web server to saturation, but there it is.
Correct - MS' fortune came from the network effects of their system, but they had to be successful in the first place for those to work in their favor.

This book has some good history of "the early years", when it wasn't clear that MS would be the winner that took all:

http://www.squeezedbooks.com/book/show/10/in-search-of-stupi...
Well, if you whistle a tune you wrote, I suppose you are.
As opposed to the "You should program like this" posts?

It makes perfect sense: Hackers and Painters, after all; you're an artist if you paint, even if the portrait sucks.
&#960; street? (3.14159th)

edit: jesus christ ycnews doesn't do unicode?

pi street? (3.14159th)
YCNews unicode bug? tm=X ?
Including unicode seems to mess up comments...

X U&#330;I&#268;O&#272;&#278; &#960;

(tm) gets replaced by an 'X', (pi) gets replaced with '&#960' and other unicode characters get changed to other characters it seems.

I just made a really funny comment about the justin.tv offices being inbetween 3rd and 4th street suggesting they are on (pi) street, and it got ruined by an encoding bug!
This, frankly, is the best part. When you type in Word or delete a message from Entourage, the response is smart and snappy.

This is ridiculous. In 2007, a software running on machinery capable of doing the job of 10 year old supercomputers, gets praised for being able to type and delete words without delays!

I would drop dead if I read this "review from the future" in 1994 when I was comfortably typing in MS Word on my powerful Compaq with 386DX CPU.

Public's expectations for computer technology has fallen so low... I guess this explains Zoho and many more paradoxes of today's computing world.
Pay Attention to Second Order Effects: Unintented Consequences
A good tiny X font
When Fire Strikes, Stop, Drop and... Sing?
nice, zero wear on the backspace key in all of those languages.
As long as we're posting our chess-variants, here's mine
I invented this when I was in high school to play with friends during study hall. It was fun.

1. The chess board is the real projective plane: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_projective_plane . So if a bishop is on h1 and moves forward and to the right, it comes out on a7 and would proceed to b6. A rook that moves down from f1 comes out on c8 and proceeds to c7.

2. The board starts out empty. Players begin with each of the eight non-pawn pieces in their "inventory". A turn consists either of moving a piece or of placing a piece from your inventory. You must place your king on the first turn.

3. All pieces except for pawns follow the same movement rules as in regular chess. Pawns can move one space in any orthogonal direction or capture one space in any diagonal direction.

4. Whenever one of your pieces other than a pawn is captured, you get a pawn placed in your inventory.

5. If one of your pawns captures a piece, your pawn transforms into the piece it captured (but remains its own color).

6. The object of the game is to capture your opponent's king.
Over 90% of American farmers were replaced by machines. We seem to be better off for it.
This does not make any sense: Mr. Kudlov, who wrote this article for NRO is replying to non-existing arguments. Gates did not favor non-free economies, therefore there is absolutely NO REASON to mention Cuba and North Korea. Moreover, Gates did not argue benefits of free markets, why bring in China, India and Eastern Europe? Gates merely says "capitalism is great let's see if we can make it work better for the poor". Gates isn't even hinting that it should be done at someone's expense. Basically Kidlov did not even care to read the original article.

Thus, after removing these obviously misplaced sentences and paragraphs, NRO's article basically turns into a lonely link to WSJ without any corresponding commentary.
Hmmm. I'd say about half of those 30 I see on a regular basis. The rest I either converse with in emails or IRC or whatever.

The core 30:
Very often = 50 %
Sometimes = 50 %

The other 30 or so (business associates):
Not often = 100%

Hope this helps. And if it is any further help when you move to the facebook platform, I try not to install facebook apps I can't see the source of. I know of several other people with this mentality; you may wish to publish source eventually to broaden your audience. Just a thought.

Again, hope this helps! :)
The book that goes with this course, Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, is excellent. It's available online:

http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book.html
my 2 cents on the strategy tip:

I'd turtle... Don't increase any of the 1's, move everything up one rank, then bounce pieces back and forth to the first rank, keeping each piece within 1 of at least two other pieces. I might have to have a couple 2's on the edges. That, or I'd try to restructure to a 3x5(+1) rather than a 2x8. I'd eventually have to increase a few numbers and break the shell a little bit, but by then my opponent will have far fewer 1's and a much more unstable structure from his attacks on me.
I just checked out wilsonminer.com ...guess what color it is :)
Newspaper Web sites draw record viewers
Apple releases the Leopard Human Interface Guidelines.
Google Health
anyone with a youtube link?
James Surowiecki on the Psychology of Product Pricing
Disclosing who you are, qualifications and relevant experience would be good I think. If you don't feel comfortable putting them up then you'd have to understand customers might not feel comfortable using your service.
Why don't you take a chessboard, get 16 pawns of each color, and try it out with a friend?
It could use some sub-pixel rendering...
Cable Company Mistakenly Empties Customers' E-Mail Accounts
If you look at his examples, his primary argument is that you can cram more information on the screen because of the iPhone's high resolution. I can't agree with him that this is a good idea.

Part of the reason that people BUY the iPhone is that it's simple and stylish, rather than the existing information heavy devices like Pocket PC phones. In particular, look at his example about the Weather- Apple's widget is small and sleek. It shows you the vital information, and it does it in strong fonts and bold styling. It's clear, and it's easy.

He squishes all of that information into a tiny corner, so that he can add a large repeating satellite view- Sure it's useful in some cases, and it's certainly a neat demonstration of the iPhone's abilities, but it fails when it comes to the task of quickly giving me the important information.

It makes me squint to see the tiny version of the temperature, and shows off, rather than helping.

Sometimes developers fall into the problem of working so often because they can, not wondering if they should.

Note- He dismisses this argument, saying that information density isn't the problem, it's laying it out clearly. I agree with him in general,in that complex information can often be presented simply, but in most of his cases, increasing the density would diminish it's usefulness.
Angry Employee Deletes All of Company's Data
Yikes... I completely disagree with 'the man' on the stocks and on the weather widget. All of the "improvements" he suggested for weather are horrendous. Adding all that noise does nothing to improve my cognition of what the temp is currently outside and what will it be later in the day.
I used to think programming languages were tools to create with but now I realize they are not tools they are a religion.
I took 6.001 in the spring of 1997 and we did the simple "Decaf Java" interpreter (in Scheme). Decaf Java is an s-exp representation of a Java program's parse tree. It is foggy and distant now but I believe we did do a problem set in actual Java and then later in the semester after doing the Scheme in Scheme metacircular evaluator we did the Decaf Java interpreter. I don't have any other 6.001 experience to compare it to but I loved the version I took.
I sometimes think of them as clothing styles.