skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's because the people that are good with math, finance, and programming don't want to use C++ (or live in Atlanta). Remove the C++, and it becomes much easier to find people. Look at how successful companies like Jane Street Capital are in recruiting, for example, even though the pool of people that know OCaml is much smaller than the pool of people that know C++.

(My experience with people that know math and finance is that they do all their work in Excel. That's because simple programs become 100-file boilerplate monsters in C++ and Java, and someone told them that Perl and Python are not real programming languages. Sigh.

OTOH, turning spreadsheets into production software is profitable and enjoyable. Let the programmers program and let the finance people do finance.)
It can be if its used incorrectly. This is why they said

reviewers needed to hold studies to a minimal standard of biological plausibility

There's two "good" ways to do this (as far as I can see). 1) Come up with a biologically plausible idea and test it, using statistics to look at results. 2) Find a pattern in the statistics and find a biologically plausible explanation.

The biology alone isn't enough, you need to statistics to back up and show actual results. However, using statistics alone and in the way indicated in the article (looking at every test and every subgroup, etc...) is exactly what your saying: avoiding rigorous thinking in favor of getting a result.
To all the startups who just applied to Y Combinator  
You may have seen this presentation before, or not. Either way it's worth watching. The last couple minutes especially.

http://techcrunch.com/2009/10/08/startups-101-the-complete-mint-presentation/

If you have a great team behind you, going solo for the time being, concept stage or beta, demo or napkin, funded or poor, at the lowest level we are the same. As Gene Wilder once said, "We are the music makers and we are the dreamers of dreams."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3pwvB4_Te8A
I am so tempted to waste half my day playing with this. One day this will replace 3D barcodes and people will get mobile phone apps from soda cans.
The promotional videos are hilarious. Attractive girl dancing with a heavy bass background and an echo voice repeating "neocube" over and over again. Hilarious, yet probably very effective for what I speculate to be a high male audience. I wonder what their conversion rate was after creating some of those videos.
Tim Bray cites a pretty good example; compare and contrast one-click shopping with PGP.

One is a broad concept that needs no further explanation in order to be implemented by a seasoned developer — the other is a genius implementation that isn't anywhere near self-explanatory.

Not saying software patents are sometimes good, just saying that there can be a difference between ideas and implementations in software.
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And Windows Mobile has Google Maps. It's almost like Microsoft and Google want users, even if those users didn't pick the right $299-for-two-years religion.
They do not.
Computer Science is the 5th highest paying undergrad degree right now.

Also, my friend has a math and econ degree, never programmed, got a new job at a trading firm, guess what the first thing they want him to do is: learn C++.

Even if the industry goes in the shitter I guarantee programmers will be better off than 90% of the economy.
Why invent a new protocol for this, rather than just using HTTP?
That makes sense, a year or so of progress makes all the difference to a development environment. And yes, knowing a bit of desktop Cocoa makes it much easier to get into, but I didn't have much of a problem learning Cocoa once I found Hillegass' book.

Corona looks interesting. I could make fun of the spelling mistake on their home page though.
Apple did it first, and they have a great sense for aesthetics ...

Nope, Several other manufacturers did this somewhere in 2003. QTEK/HTC had a few of them early on, HP introduced the iPaq H6300 (I could get one in europe early 2004)... Apple came with the first iPhone in 2007 (that's three years later).

Of course you could argue that they understood the problem better than (most) other manufacturers (I'm pretty sure they do) but Apple being 'first' is definately not true.
Gravity is proved. Evolution is rock solid.

Sure, thats old physics/biology. You can't compare that to state of the art medicine. You need to look into modern cosmology, string theory, quantum mechanics and make the comparison. Unfortunately, I'm not in a position to make such a comparison.

That aside, the incentives are different. Medicine --> $$$. String theory doesn't.
The collection of sample programs is fun to look at:
http://www.dangermouse.net/esoteric/piet/samples.html
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Do I have to be the first to say just how hilarious these images are? I don't care for the Mac but even I'm interested by it now.
No argument. For an example, the email of Chinese dissidents where accessed at the Google break in.

OTOH... certainly, a web email account isn't that safe -- but are you better than Google's security people? I haven't been a sysadmin for over a decade.
Just started using it, and it is among the snappiest (latency-wise) web applications I've tried.
Of course genes matter. But very few humans live and eat like animals. The sheer complexity of food processing byproducts and additives humans are offering their digestive tract makes the problem intractable.
It all depends on the context - sure on some platforms (mostly embedded) it's just your binary and the hardware.

Anything else, where you start having dependencies on components sourced from elsewhere then you are in this situation.

Personally, I don't really see what the problem is - looking at and using other peoples software is usually a great learning experience.
Maybe I'm missing something incredibly obvious, but one way to make much less invasive is to hire both male and female specialists and only allow a person to be scanned by someone of the same gender.
By RAID 0, they likely just mean "no RAID", where the redundancy is across machines, not just disks.
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The program for calculating Pi is my favourite. "Naturally, a more accurate value can be obtained by using a bigger program." made my day.
Exactly. Have a variety of text hardware and a video test suite. Don't release the new drivers until they pass.
The test can tell you to watch fat, watch carbs, or watch both. I can tell you to eat less fat and less carbs right now without you having to take a genetic test. Animals eat what you give them; for humans, willpower is the biggest challenge in successful dieting.
And what do you do if a large corporation uses your invention anyway, and doesn't tell anyone they're doing so? Firstly, you have to find out they've infringed. Secondly, you have to sue for protection.

How will you accomplish either of those steps, let alone both?
Quick! Something interesting. Let's mark it for deletion!

(Sadly, it looks like they've already made two attempts on this article)
I'd take the view that the emphasis has shifted from 'can we do this? / is it possible' to 'how shall we do this? / what will make our users happiest'. Both of these are great aims, but the former is probably more fun. There will still be edges where the emphasis is still on 'is it possible' but as the technology matures, you'll probably have to seek them out, rather than be there automatically.
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It's a pity that so many friends of mine gave up programming after starting out with Java... But, at least MIT didn't ditch Scheme for Java @intro level. Better Python than Java any day :-)
So where would it be in 2010?
As an Android user I wouldn't disagree with you; I was just trying to present an example which the article's author wouldn't feel the need to argue about (software restrictions is a holy war topic, price probably isn't :) ).
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You're overthinking this.

The client doesn't mean that 10k people are going to hit the site at the same microsecond. The client means that there will be 10,000 eventgoers accessing the site within a particular period. Many of the clients in this industry, being cough fundamentally non-technical people, believe that the period of reference is "one day".

As you've probably noticed, a $20 a month VPS plus Apache can easily chew through 10k visitors in a day (I wouldn't use Apache personally, but if I were competent at configuring it, yeah, no problem whatsoever). Adjust upwards if your client anticipates a particular instantaneous deluge (think "Steve Jobs stands up at the keynote and says 'My robot minions, all of you need to hit this URL right now!').

P.S. Your client is wildly overestimating the audience that will actually come to the site. Don't tell him I said that.
Well, actually the purpose of patents IS to allow you to get rich. Why? Well, by protecting the invention, you allow the inventor to make money with it for some time. This means that if you put millions in R&D, you have a guarantee that if there's a result, you can also win back the investment. Do you really think pharmaceutical companies would pour so much money into research if whatever they invented was immediatly copied by another company which doesn't put any money in R&D.

But I agree that patents are sometimes absurd, software patents are quite absurd most of the time.
Scrolling (blurry-looking) text inside flash. Fail.
I see some of you have accounts. Anybody willing to explain how this is different from Wikipedia and Yahoo Answers? I didn't find the About page enlightening. Thanks!
> It seems to me that the only good non-mirage reason for shared libraries was disk space usage.

Shared libraries are shared in memory too. If you have 5 separate copies of libfoo and you start up applications using them, you'll have 5 copies of libfoo in memory too. And memory is much scarcer resource than disk space.
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The question being debated is whether meat was a part of the diet of our ancestors. Whether it's justifiable is a seperate discussion and should not be brought into discussion. Facts don't depend on our moral opinion about them.
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This was maybe the main reason why I switched to Ruby. The largest part of my time was spent on integrating other people's work. Don't get me wrong. It would take me more time to write the code from scratch and it would have introduced redundancy. But it just didn't feel right spending so much time on getting other people's stuff play together. I think the problem is that C/C++ and Java don't scale semantically.
I started doing Project Euler problems for the same reason last year. I even sat up with friends one night working on a few problems, just to recapture that college feeling.

But I know writing algorithmically interesting problems are not likely to appear at work, and I've made my peace with that, along with the paycheck I get for writing enterprise systems.
What kind of position is that?! Someone accused you of wrongdoing and the only valid defense is suing the other? What happened to correcting each other? Accepting that misinterpretations and mistakes are human?
Clickable Links:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=702937

http://peekfeed.com/
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I was actually able to scroll through and read it rather quickly. I handwrite in all caps, so maybe that has something to do with it?
I love the new look. At first sight, they just achieved what they wanted to express: lightness, reliability, precision.
We are the music makers,

And we are the dreamers of dreams,

Wandering by lone sea-breakers,

And sitting by desolate streams;

World-losers and world-forsakers,

On whom the pale moon gleams:

Yet we are the movers and shakers

Of the world for ever, it seems.

- Arthur O'Shaughnessy
Umm, ok. I'm not quite sure why it's necessary to post that video again. Are you suggesting it should be reposted for inspiration every time there's a YC round closing? How did you decide on this specific video out of the hundreds of inspirational start-up videos around the web? Why is this one better? Is it due to your personal tastes, perspectives, etc, or to some objective evaluation?

Why not repost all of pg's essays too, just in case it can help some applicants? We could fill the front page with just that sort of info. Wouldn't that be cool? It would help all the start-ups, funded or poor, concept stage or beta, etc.

Maybe I'm just being a tad grumpy, but I don't see why you post this as an unlinked post, but actually have a link inside. Why not just post the link itself and let that fight to the top if it's worth seeing again?
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Guys, if you really want to get a good scare, I suggest you follow Jim Rogers, and Marc Faber. These guys have been massively successful investors, because of their ability to watch the world, and they now predict a massive global upheaval. Sorry to be a downer.

http://jimrogers1.blogspot.com/
http://marcfaberchannel.blogspot.com/
Okay,I see different things. He said big companies will win and small ones will fail, and he thinks that the future is in "molecular biology", Wifi and other advanced technologies, which I don't agree with.

The future of the Internet and technology? I see that companies like Envato will win in the long run. MicroStock sites like Themeforest, code canyon and Active Den. Every man and his dog will purchase a computer, install some software and build something tiny and useful. People will build script, themes, plug-ins... They'll make enough money from it to live and some will become rich.

The ones that don't understand well what it is and the bad developers will get jobs at the 'big companies'. The smart will start small startups that either sells for millions or make 10 times a salary they can get from working a 9-5 job.

The future is in the hand of the smart. Sites like Hacker News and companies like Ycombinator will help them. I'm from a third world country, I know programming before I knew the Internet, but I wasn't able to use my full potential before sites like HN and blogs, forums, communities existed.

They completely changed my mind, made me another person. From someone that loves programming and build software to someone that understand the market and is able to build something that can makes him many and avoid working for a company with a stupid boss.

The future is in Freelancing, at least for me.
It's only trivial to bypass, nothing else wrong with it.
back then, the idea of a first person shooter was barely established, and their closest models for many mechanics were from 2D shooters like Robotron, Berserk and Tempest.

Not strictly true. Wolfenstein was already well-established and had many clones using its engine.

In 1993, the message Doom sent to the videogame world was something like “use cutting edge technology to make something dark, edgy and violent”.

Again, Wolf 3D did that before Doom.

Good article, mind you, but the lack of mention of Wolf 3D is a bit of a glaring factual omission.
Just to be clear, this is not a patent on a plain vanilla linked list. It's a patent on a linked list where each node in the list has 1 or more extra next pointers, to facilitate different orderings.

Now, if the US is serious about innovation and economic recovery, they will employ software patent evaluators who are actually aware of the state of the art in software engineering / computer science and who can judge the obviousness of an invention. Their failure to do so has resulted in a lot of extra friction that prevents economic growth. Every frivolous patent suit filed, every agreement to give in and pay up, is another bit of economic growth lost to friction.

Good luck with the recession.
As other commenters have pointed out, both here and on the blog itself, the blog post assumes that a dollar taken out in fees in 2010 is worth the same as a dollar taken out in 2160. Depending on how you want to look at that, it's either ignoring inflation or ignoring the possibility of investing the fees, or both.

If you start with the client's $300, deliver 10% return a year, take 1% in fees per year, reinvest the fees in your own fund, then after 150 years

Client's fund: 123E+6
Fees: 362E+6

Huh? How is it possible that the fees are more than the client's fund? It turns out that the fees Bernie puts in his own fund don't get hit with the 1% fee themselves, so they're getting a return of 10% per year instead of 9%. After about 75 years, that makes the fees fund come out ahead.

With 2% fees, the results after 150 years are

Client: 31E+6
Fees: 454E+6

I.e., Bernie makes more on a 2% fee than a 1% fee, reason is restored.

With a bit of luck, I haven't made a mistake. It'd be nice if someone confirmed or contradicted my numbers. Here's what I did:

-module(bernie).
-export([loop/5]).

loop(Year, End_year, Capital, Fees, _Fee_percent) when Year == End_year ->
io:fwrite("year: ~p Capital: ~g Fees: ~g\n", [Year, Capital, Fees]);
loop(Year, End_year, Capital, Fees, Fee_percent) ->
loop(Year + 1, End_year, Capital * (1.10 - Fee_percent),
Fees * 1.10 + Capital * Fee_percent, Fee_percent).

Edit: indented code to try and stop it from getting mangled.
Patents where created to replace trade secrets.

Bullshit.

If an idea is so fucking-obvious in hindsight that you don't need the patent's description to re-implement it, than that shouldn't be patentable.

That's painting with an absurdly broad brush and probably covers thousands of things that you might otherwise regard as patent-worthy.

I have an ice cream scoop with two hinged handles like a pair of scissors with two halves of a scoop for 'blades'. When you squeeze the handles together, the scoop scissors together so you can scoop, and when you let them apart, the scoop opens, loosening the ice cream. Works great.

"Duh!", right? http://www.google.com/patents?vid=USPAT6474974

Oops, I guess the guy that thought that one up shouldn't have a right to profit from the value he's added to my ice-cream scooping experience, seeing as how it's so obvious in retrospect. I guess we should all have an equal right to make our own copies of that scoop--which we hadn't thought of but surely we would have all thought of eventually seeing as how it's so obvious now. If he had wanted to profit from his invention he should have made it more complicated.

Or, maybe obviousness-after-the-fact is not a good way of judging patentability.

Yeah, Apple did a great job designing the UI ... but sooner or later somebody else would've done it anyway.

Can you relate that to the things patents that Apple has actually claimed to be infringed?
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It seems the author of the article is stuck in a problemscape where all the problems he would find interesting are already solved.

One solution is to move to a new area of software development that offers challenging problems.

I am currently, like many others it seems, working with creating enterprise CRUD-apps and integrating them. I try to find joy in reaching for a skill level where I can produce solutions quickly, solutions that are easy to change, solutions that immediately lets you know where and why an error has occurred, solutions that are secure, solutions that scale, solutions ran in the cloud instead of on servers that it takes it operations months to set up etc. There really aren't that many people out there that can do all of the above well (me included) and there are lots of money to be saved for your employee/clients doing those things well. I think we would see a lot less attempts at off-shoring if more people in enterprise-it would strive for that kind of knowledge.

I guess what I'm trying to say is, maybe one shouldn't have too high expectations of the technical challenges in problemscapes that have been mostly solved already but that, at least in my area, there are still challenges to be found. They are just of another kind and maybe you can find them interesting? They keep me interested enough at least.

sigh Why am I posting on hacker news again?
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It's more subtle than that, and to a certain extent it's zero-sum. Countries compete to attract skilled immigrants, and there is a finite supply of doctors, engineers etc willing to relocate per year. As we see in the UK there is a much larger supply of people who simply shop around for the best welfare then claim "asylum". The brutal truth is that it's in no country's best interest to admit people who are unable or simply unwilling to contribute to their economy.
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This is a good start, although I spotted a few things that aren't quite correct from what little I know about Redis: it is a key value store, but the values can be of complex types, which makes it a bit more interesting (he does mention this in the notes). Also, antirez has done the VM mode to make it so that you can use the disk.

I'd like to see more articles like this, though, to get a better grasp of which of these things are good for what.
Easier: install Pipe Viewer (http://www.ivarch.com/programs/pv.shtml) and, instead of

cp a b

run

pv < a > b
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Or you could just do:

cp $SOURCE /dev/stdout | pv | cp /dev/stdin $DEST

Edit: "pv <a >b" is simpler, but isn't the game to fit "cp" somewhere? :)
Nobody is forcing you to want to interact with the real world.

The reality is that "back in the day", computers weren't useful to very many people. Now they are.
Huh, I hadn't heard of Cantarell before. At first glance, the hinting and so forth isn't quite as polished as Droid, but I'll use it for while and see if it grows on me.
The iPhone has market share. Developers go where the market share is. Microsoft's desktop developer community is so strong because they own such a dominant slice of the desktop market. The iPhone is no different.

The Android market is making a really strong showing. It's not to the scale of the iPhone app economy yet, but with stuff like the N1 and Desire coming out, the potential for Android's market share to increase is quite strong, and with that come developers. If Android phones were to become popular enough, I have no doubt that developers would desert Apple and its punishing app store policies and gateways in record time.
Actually they might just use cider (http://www.transgaming.com/business/cider/), which is afaik similar to wine. Half Life 2 and other source engine games seem to run just fine on wine, getting Gold and Platinum ratings (http://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&...), so this looks like the easier route to me.
This is precisely why I think I enjoy developing for the iPhone more than web development.

Yes, Cocoa is a massive library, but it has 99% of the things that I need. I think in objective-c and cocoa.

When it comes to web development I'm doing 100's of tiny little things in 2 different languages with 2 different markups to get something done.