skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Actually I rather enjoyed the article, especially the opening bit about the pursuit of popularity destroying blog value, but you can't just pretend that software engineering is just simply a form of engineering still in its dark ages (though it's obviously cruder than traditional engineering disciplines). Computer science is an extension of pure math going back thousands of years, of which civil engineering is another only slightly older offshoot. The problem spaces are simply not comparable.

In civil engineering you are dealing the same constraints: physics, which can be refined to perfection because they will be used billions upon billions of times throughout history and will never change. In civil engineering the stakes are high, people will lose lives. Finally, the parameters for success are very easy to measure in advance... it's easy to calculate how much traffic a bridge will carry, and you can even render exactly what it will look like for aesthetic evaluation before construction begins at all.

Contrast with software where the problem space is infinitely larger (ie. the entire realm of abstract thought vs physical space, which also makes it less intuitive by people btw). The costs of failure and repair are most often trivial (especially for web software). And the suitability of software is often not known at all until it is delivered (in this regard architecture has more in common with software engineering). You can't just hand-wave these things away by stating that software engineering is an immature discipline. Even with the exact same number of man hours behind software engineering that you have behind civil engineering, there would still be a such a tiny dent in the problem space as to leave software engineering looking primitive.

It's not that no one takes software engineering seriously either, take military or NASA software. Those guys have the most advanced software engineering principles on the planet, but even there, it's specifically suited to their use case. I'm sure there's a lot we could all learn from them, but if you want Microsoft Word to have that quality are you prepared to pay $500,000 a head to run it?

I agree that Joel totally threw the baby out with the bathwater in the duct-tape programmer defense, but let's not disparage the state of software engineering. It's certainly much less disciplined than other forms of engineering, but that's simply a cost-benefit tradeoff that seems reasonably close to optimal.
Curriculum, Companies, Cooperation and Conflict
for what it is worth, i managed to check out your great work by using tulip's dot import to get tulip's tlp file format, which you support just fine. i like where the tool is going!
Slowing down immune system's "brakes" may improve HIV vaccines
Our office switched to Ubuntu 2 years ago, and every 6 months we wonder "how can they possibly make this better" only to be totally wowed that they've done something wonder each release.

This one looks really well integrated, and competes with Mac for style, and luxory (you know, like integrated music store, your own private cloud,etc.)
> If you're honestly trying to tell me Google Go has nearly half the developer support that Objective-C does

Who said that?
Well, that makes sense, but it's not always how things play out. Especially if you're not in a position to order others to play fair: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boxer_Rebellion#War_reparations
I think its more confusing to say that insertion is O(1) when insertion in the general case is O(n). Hash tables should be another discussion.
Yes and no. There have been some cool projects for Rails that provide administrative interfaces, but they all suffer from a lack of critical mass. Django's admin interface is just core to the framework - not because it has to be, but in the way that the core team sees it as something that can't languish.

On the horizon, merb-admin is being ported to Rails 3 by Yehuda Katz (http://yehudakatz.com/2009/12/31/spinning-up-a-new-rails-app...). If that comes to fruition, I think it might become a standard tool for Rails users who want admin pages. We'll see.

Being a part of the framework itself makes the Django admin interface always receive attention. Separate Rails projects do exist, but are often by one or a small number of people and not as widely used as the Django admin interface. So, they are there, but often don't have quite the polish and utility of Django's interface.
Grigori Perelman, Reclusive Russian Math Genius, Refuses $1 Million Prize
TIOBE [0], as referenced in the article.

[0]: http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index....
I'd like to point out that in this case Facebook is only pursuing trademark issues. They have not asked the author to take down the script. They asked him to change his name from "Facebook Purity". He changed it to "FB Purity". Facebook says that's not good enough. I'm inclined to agree.
Less is more. But still less.
The Spy in the Middle
How many people have the ability to actually improve something? Should those people not demand quality?

I can't engineer a car - does that mean I shouldn't get mad when my airbags fail to deploy? I can't cook well - does that mean I shouldn't be disappointed by a substandard meal at a restaurant?
Chatroulette Bingo Card Generator
Why is he so surprised by classic M$ behavior ? Everyone knew this would happen when .Net was first hyped back in 2000. It's possible that M$ marketing sold him some BS story on the side and/or piled on some cash that clouded his judgment.

If you dance to the tune, you must pay the piper ...
This certainly speaks for itself and is a drastic measure. Be aware of a strong anti-chinese bias in the general US media, though. James Fallows (spent some years in China as senior editor for The Atlantic and has written lots of articles about China) has often argued that it's not as extreme of a picture as is often presented in the mainstream media. The Chinese government has relaxed quite a topics of regulation in the last years (e.g. introduced some kind of property laws for farmers, for the first time ever) and it can be argued that they have indeed helped several hundred million people rise out of extreme poverty, the most in the world. China is just really intend on tightly controlling a few important parts of society, public opinion being one of them. Chinese society in general can probably be said to place more importance on getting out of poverty and growing into materialism than fighting for individual rights with a 'dubious material value' to them.
Just a question: mongo uses some kind of memory cache like memcached? or I need to implement it aside to get faster-faster performance? I'm thinking on a small app (10K visitors a day).
That in itself speaks strongly for YC. I'm tempted to make a joke about startup unionization.
Summary: blog author disagrees with Spolsky, but doesn't really provide any arguments.

Pointing to the Tacoma bridge seems a bit silly. I suspect the Tacoma bridge incident is more like the unpredictable black swan, so more meticulous engineering would not have prevented it either.
Mongo should be fast enough that you don't need to use memcached. It uses memory mapped files (which is also important to know since by default it only flushes data to disk every 60 seconds)
That is a nice list of things you don't like.
I feel like I should point out that Unicode is not being used correctly in the article. A better understanding of Unicode encodings might help in the competition. http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html
Good for you! Sounds like a cool company to work at.

(lol. I'm an Ubuntu fanboy, sad to say.)
Huh. I've used IntelliJ on Windows for close to 8 years and never noticed any font rendering issues.
Sometimes people ask me: why do you support China? My answer is this: Every economic development has been accompanied by huge misery and death. In Africa, South America, India, etc. When you stop shaking hands with the upper class business men and go live with the poor, you'll understand suffering.

I prefer that the people lose a bit of freedom, but they have to suffer less. Those who disagree - at least be sure you have once actually been in that situation. Don't live your life in comfort and then forget that this thing you demand called freedom of speech also has always meant people dying in the streets.

You are the people that would have said in Rwanda: don't block the radio stations calling for people to be murdered - speech should be free.

I've been in Africa, I've been in China, I've been in South America, in the U.S and in Europe. I've seen the dead people, I've hung around with freedom loving geeks, I've talked to favela children. And after all that, I have chosen that I prefer that the people get educated and rich at the expense of free speech.

I'd much rather see a blocked website than dead child.
Indeed .. most people (see roback's dead comment below) have no clue what their mantras even mean.
where is the original chinese text?
Go to your public library and check out _Manufacturing Consent_. It's about how the US and its allies create it.
In general the original source should be linked. Certainly in this case.

No reason, though, to call the author of the submitted article a “symbiont”. You could do that if the author of the submitted article is also the submitter (not the case here), but simply submitting the original article would probably be more appropriate.
Here's a question: Why work for Microsoft? A friend went to work there recently, and he made a very good point: In Micosoft's "First Great Age," they had a mission everyone could understand: A computer on every desktop and in every household. This is not one of those craptastic missions CEO's write on their corporate retreats full off synergies and leverages, it's clear, direct, and best of all it's objective, it's measurable.

What's the mission now that there is a computer on every desktop and in every household? Is it as clear? Is it as direct? Will it last for a decade or more? Is it meaningful to every employee?

All I need is someone to answer that question for me and I'll be ready to change my mind.
>In civil engineering the stakes are high, people will lose lives.

If you're building a bridge, yes. But it's not always so critical.

This holds in software engineering as well - If you're mucking about writing the next tetris, odds are, noone's going to die if you stuff it up. If you're writing embedded code in a medical device, lives definitely are at risk (and if you step back and look, not only is embedded code the majority of deployed code out there, but it also has some of the most mature development practices - not everything in software is agile)

The problem arises when you try to draw the line between those two extremes - for example, who knew people were daft enough to follow GPS instructions that navigated them under bridges that were obviously too law, or off piers into harbours, or into oncoming traffic on one-way streets or onto train tracks (complete with oncoming trains). The criticality of the system you're developing isn't always a simple thing to determine.

And don't forget - history has recorded very very similar arguments to yours that claim exactly what you're claiming, while arguing that mechanical engineering will never go from art to science...
I hesitate to say this because I actually have an anti-subversion rant in the works, but I think he makes a good point here.

For any develop who is at all serious about their craft, it's absolutely insane to go on using a crippled tool like subversion. However if you have a team of talentless monkey coders mixed with a generous helping of non-technical asset producers (designers, copywriters, etc), then modern VCS won't really give you any compelling benefit, so you are likely better off taking the better tooling.

In the long run Subversion would be better off if they just rewrote it on top of git plumbing, but barring that, it's not necessarily true that everyone has much to gain from modern VCSes.
I worked on a project once where this one person always posed the question, "But what if google just copied us?" I always mentally ignored the question, because I never considered it an issue. Just cause Google "can" doesn't mean they will "succeed". Buzz is a perfect case in point, and it's not the only one in Google's long history.
A more elegant (IMHO) implementation of the q-list has the second pointer point not at the tail, but rather at either the last next pointer or at the head pointer. This makes your appending logic simpler by not having to deal with the special case of an empty list.

A similar trick can be used with hash tables where the buckets are s-lists. You still get O(1) deletion within a bucket if your hash table returns the address of the pointer that refers to the element, rather than the element itself; and you save one whole pointer per element by doing so.
> Unless I'm mistaken a majority of Chinese actually support their government

I also think so, but this statement is as popular as is its opposite. Does anyone know of some real studies on this matter?
Recent versions of IDEA (7+) with recent versions of JDK (6+) support subpixel antialiasing.
In general, is maintaining a good reputation an adequate incentive for VC firms to avoid abusing founders or angel investors?
I worked in the game industry back in the 90s and early naughties. There were pretty much two routes forward: work for a small company making new, creative games -- and watch the company go bankrupt after 18 months on average -- or work for a big company (e.g. EA) and make the same damn game over and over again. And I mean that literally -- when I interviewed at EA, it turned out that they had one guy on staff who had done EA Soccer every year for 20 years.

Even if you worked for a small company on "new" ideas, they weren't that new -- most likely, you were coming up on your own tweak to last year's big success story.

Overall, the field was just too depressing, and I got out.
"I'd much rather see a blocked website than dead child."

False Dichotomy.

The Chinese Communist party came to and maintained power over millions of people killed for ideological reasons. Dissidents are still killed for daring to think differently. Every dictatorship and autocracy warns of chaos and unpeakable bad things that will happen if its benevolent "guidance" and secret police and gulags are set aside and people could believe and speak as their consciences dictate . And some fools buy into this sophistry and support them to avoid a hypothetical violent future. It helps when you are profiting off such oppression somehow (say, by feeding off artificially depressed wages and currency and being chummy with the opressors)

Nice rhetorical trick with Rwanda radio ;-)
Creating this "repeat player" effect is awesome. Sometimes the best-drafted legal provisions can have loopholes. This kind of leverage makes everything much simpler.
Memory mapped files are nice, but once the mapped file starts to get much bigger than the physical memory pages the operating system can allocate, it starts to be asymptotically the same as accessing the filesystem from the point of view of latency, so indeed for datasets considerably bigger than RAM it is not possible to be as fast as memcached. Not a MongoDB limit, but a nature-imposed limit :)
Just because there are no shiny GUIs to git yet (are there? I don't know)? Otherwise git seems to be easier to use to me. For one thing, it doesn't pollute every directory with .svn folders.

I suppose you can use subversion standalone? It's been too long since I used it. Anyway, with git just type "git init" and you are ready to go.
Too bad no one went after Chrome. Perhaps prize money should be in proportion to difficulty of compromise from previous years. Otherwise, it seems like everyone is grabbing the low hanging fruits-- relatively speaking of course. (None of these exploits are "low hanging" in the traditional sense of exploits)
It's a fucking script, not genocide. Big difference.
Nonsense. Listen to what de Icaza says:

"Microsoft has shot the .NET ecosystem in the foot because of the constant threat of patent infringement that they have cast on the ecosystem"

He notably did NOT say:

"RMS has shot the .NET ecosystem in the foot because of the fears of patent infringement that he has cast on the ecosystem."

De Icaza is clearly and explicitly laying blame at Microsoft's feet.
Well, if you look at their market share http://www.netmarketshare.com/os-market-share.aspx?qprid=9
The iPhone is only 0.5% of users, and that's probably much less in the rest of the world, same for osX (5% but only in the US). So Go not being far behind is not something that's entirely impossible.

Edit: Observe that the TIOBE index is not about the best programming language or the language in which most lines of code have been written.

The index can be used to check whether your programming skills are still up to date or to make a strategic decision about what programming language should be adopted when starting to build a new software system. The definition of the TIOBE index can be found here. http://www.tiobe.com/content/paperinfo/tpci/tpci_definition.... "

So it's not about developper support.
"Microsoft has shot the .NET ecosystem in the foot because of the constant threat of patent infringement that they have cast on the ecosystem."

De Icaza is not acknowledging that some people are scared of patent infringement. He's acknowledging that Microsoft itself has scared people away through its constant threats.
I don't think your tone is bad at all, like ableal thinks. I also think the same way as you, I've almost given up on commenting here.
The party in china does not kill people. You say it does, but there are no reports saying that. You've just bought into propaganda.

Talk about the present day (2000+) party, not about the past. Because if we're talking about the past, the EU killed millions of people in gas chambers, and the US divided people by the color of their skin and condemmed those with the wrong color to permanent slavery.

I have SEEN the chaos that the freedom you want has caused. The chinese mode of non-freedom has not caused that.

Let me give you just a little example: In India people are burnt to death for being witches or for theft. This does not happen in china.

There is real violence in most developing countries of the world. In china, there is very little violence. If the country were loosened up, there WILL be violence.

So, just observing the present, the chinese system is the system that has the least violence. And that's why I support it.

If you want that freedom, are YOU going to go live in the midst of the violence? Or do you just want to condemn people to it, while you sit at your computer?
I'm not going to applaud China for being ever so slightly less evil than they used to be.
One month of subscriber revenue would surpass any kind of revenue they could get from the app store.
I tried to like Subversion for quite a long while (any improvement on CVS would be good). In the end the main differences from CVS were. 1: a repository that (at the time) you could not delete "oops I checked in a DVD" from. 2: an Eclipse module that broke during most Eclipse updates.
Polish your older ones i guess?
Facebook Appears To Be Worth $35 Billion
Affordable Health Insurance- Free Health Insurance Quotes
Yes, but with git, mercurial and bzr you can sink with a USB key on a train (w/o wifi or cellular network).
Awesome: "Judging by the reactions of the investors, the recession seems to be over."
The Bomb for Beginners: A DIY Guide to Going Nuclear
I was just thinking about my "django" search results, and I thought about why the Django framework ranked so highly. The type of people that write about Django and link to sites covering Django, they could be the same sort of people who know SEO better than the site operator for a tribute page to a jazz musician. So that might not have been the best example.
The more currently unknown branches there were walking around, the more surprising it is that we haven't found more fossils from the ones that are currently unknown.
You could applaud them for helping several hundred million people get out of extreme poverty, a grand social experiment if there ever was one. I know it's easy to take the moral high ground here, just think about if any other country recently has accomplished something remotely similar. You probably cannot accomplish such a feat by going from socialism to capitalism in a day (simplified).
Replace "can" with "should", and I'll happily agree with you.

I'm a vim fan, personally. The keyboard is ideal for high-speed, high-skill interaction. Most GUI-centric applications fail completely in this area, where a lot of old applications had a lot of focus on it. Both is probably the best, but that's hard work and doesn't always fit with the GUI without it being cluttered for a "clean" interface.
I would go so far as to say that exercise is a red herring if your goal is simply to decrease your mass. I would also go so far as to say that simply decreasing your mass isn't a great goal to have.
Yes, it is in fact far fetched. They are powerless to do anything about their dollar reserves without losing substantial amounts of wealth.
> Is the upper left pixel in this (RR G BB), which the article seems to assert, or (RR G BB G) ?

Take a look at the photo vs. the debugger snapshot of the "3G" text. The uprights in the G are 3 pixels wide, and display as one of either:

BB G RR G BB G
RR G BB G RR G

Thus the point of the article: A "pixel" is either "BB G" or "RR G". There are 800x480 of these. But neither of them is "a pixel" (RBG) like we're used to talking about, it's less than that. There's one (small) green and one (bigger) red OR blue in each pixel.

I had a Nokia N810, with an 800x480 LCD of approximately this size. It was gorgeous. I was expecting something similar, but got this, with my N1. The screen is, easily, the most disappointing part of the N1 in my opinion. The enhanced contrast of the AMOLED doesn't come close to making up for the jagginess of the uneven pixels. Vertical, and especially diagonal, lines just look horrible.
I have had some bad experiences with memory mapped databases (particularly Berkeley DB and Tokyo Tyrant) - both these seem to be very greedy with IO writes when one starts to have lots of data and lots of updates. I think Reddit experienced a similar problem (as memcachedb is based on Berkeley DB).

Does anybody know what Cassandra does?
Princeton researchers find that HFCS prompts considerably more weight gain
What Every Software Developer Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (2003)
While I cannot forgive the Chinese regime for their methods, there is a point here that shouldn't be so quickly downvoted. China has raised 400 Million people out of poverty in the last several decades.
Alexa Meade: Unknown to London show in 2 weeks
He has to spend 5 to 15 minutes everyday hiding followers? Does he follow that many new people in buzz everyday (automatically or implicitly) or are they not staying hidden? That estimate seems large.
My initial thought was "SVN changes?", as a post about its "future" wouldn't likely be about how it plans to stagnate and die, unless it were being abandoned (also unlikely).

While showing that I haven't used it much and don't know its history well at all, it does reveal a fair amount of how they're perceived; I'm hardly a rarity in this. It's hard to make large / "real" changes to anything like this without effectively making something new (massively breaking changes, for example. ie, anything related to workflow). SVN is largely doomed, methinks.
this blog post talks a bit about a real world implementation and when they do and do not use memcached with mongodb: http://www.businessinsider.com/how-we-use-mongodb-2009-11
Disputed Island Disappears Into Ocean