skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
He implies in the last paragraph that it's his final post. Still, I think there's a point here. Writing, when you're that good at it, isn't so easy to give up. Also, the blog has been a huge part of Spolsky's success. So I bet he'll revive or continue it in some form before too long.

Edit: I hope he does, too. I probably disagree with him more than half the time, but there are few other writers on software who consistently hold my attention, and almost no one who consistently makes me laugh.
Curious. My psychopathology course always emphasized a diathesis-stress model. Their position was that "mental disorders" are functionally defined behaviors involving biological, emotional, and social factors in varying degrees.
You just have to be smart about when to apply caching. People can always cite competing caching rules and examples that support them, but only you know your app and whether or not a particular slowness can benefit from more optimizing or more caching.
'I Am Big in Australia'
haven't tried them where they located? Not to hijack the thread but I love good coffee.
A life is destroyed due to human carelessness and/or irresponsibility
Basically, don't optimize prematurely. Especially since doing so increases the amount of moving parts and, therefore, cost of changes.
What do you edit lisp in?
Number of games played, by itself, is a terrible practice metric for chess. Study time is vital, and the type of game is also extremely important. How the player plays the game is important. Do they just play the same opening every time? If so, they aren't going to learn as much as someone who never plays the same thing twice. Do they review the game? The amount of practice value squeezed out of a single game of chess is vastly different between me and a professional, and in turn vastly different from someone who doesn't care at all about chess and me.

You can play 10000 games of chess and not learn a thing if you aren't setting out to learn.
neat. thanks for the explanations!
Reddit had a chilling "Ask Me Anything" thread little while back that you might be interested in:

http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/a5xvv/iama_diagnosed_s...
Seconded. As I recall, the PCL-R matches far fewer people than DSM-IV's ASPD criteria.
That first blank will be filled with "suck!"
The tech sector is only one sector of the economy. Even if they did want to change there may be other industries that would push against it.
The project manager's view includes both the business side and personal fears/biases. And as people are wont to do, a PM will disguise personal doubts as business decisions.

What is also never mentioned is that what employees desire is as much the business of a business as other things.

But suppose we buy 100% into the maximizing shareholder mantra.

If you have programmers that are interested in these technologies, your shop is probably doing some interesting work (since otherwise these programmers would not have bothered working at your shop). In this case, careful leveraging of new technology (that is, choosing something that's not too far right on the curve for your purposes) can give you a leg up on the competition, since the programmers are happier and you can offer things that the competition cannot.

A manager that avoids new technologies in this context is not doing what is good for business.

It is a false dichotomy that what is good for programmers is necessarily unrealistic or bad for business.
Nice! Those things are so darn magically delicious!
No one has to be executed here. How about "start using a different tool"?
Yes, but this is precisely the kind of term they will choose, regardless of appropriateness; "piracy" was not exactly a textbook definition of copyright infringement, either. I am pointing out that "stealing" is not an improvement over "piracy", as far as the perceived coolness of the crime.
Do you hear this sound? Yes, that's a wake up call for Apple. People will start soon looking at which smartphone is more compatible with their tv sets
To learn French, did you take classes? self-taught? What did you find was the most effective approach?
Here here.

Surely it's not hard to make an operating system and browser that makes it almost transparent to install a codec or bit of software.

I agree, get gstreamer or something else to work seamlessly. And at the same time, give me the ability to turn the damn thing off. I can already imagine, the state of web pages to come, it will be like a license to put video adds all over my webpage, and drag my cpu into hades.
"There is no difference with going into a store and stealing Pringles or a handbag and taking this stuff"

Other than shoplifting is probably a misdeamenor with small fine and maybe 30-90 days in county jail. Whereas copyright infringment does such violence to (USA)society that it's been deemed necessary to punish with 5yrs in (federal) jail and $250,000 fine per instance of infringing. So, actually physically stealing CD == wrist slap (first time offender). Threatining out of date industry's business model 75 years and 3.75 million dollars (15 song CD).

"International Chamber of Commerce which argued that 1.2 million jobs could be lost in Europe as a result of copyright infringement by 2015"

Is a meaningless metric unless compared to the number of jobs that could be lost in Europe by 2015 due to the ever expanding and insanely broad copyright protections.

I personally have had a career in IT due to pirated versions of DOS/Windows (20+ years ago, gotta start somewhere) and other softwares along the way. And btw by becoming a professional I've recommended, got purchased & installed way, way more $$$ worth of software than I have ever pirated. Studies have been done showing similar effects for music.

Of course these days cause of absurd DRM, EULA's, et al I recommend / work with Open Source almost exclusively. So, it's really your own paranoid control fetishes that are destroying your industries. Not Sexsay Pirates.
You're right that caching is the easiest thing. That's why people do it.

The problem is that they do it right away, and then eventually the things slows down anyway, and then they're hosed. In the example you describe, the hosing would be relatively minor, since you could hand-optimize the queries and simply plug them back in. In the more common case of caching your 50-query homepage, you might end up needing to buy more servers without ever realizing that you could have gotten it down to one query.

So yeah, if you're confident that your signup page is never going to get the sort of load that'll slow it down despite your caching then you're right, you're all set.
Yelp's Legal Troubles Mount
I would just like to say thanks for being honest and up front. There are so many examples of non-technical people being demanding and unappreciative of programmers, that it's refreshing to see you have an open attitude about this. It's much more pleasant than hearing requests like "I need a programmer to build my social networking site for $100!"
That's just it. You can teach a sociopath to "care". They tend to figure it out for themselves. That's what makes them so dangerous. I've read some articles that claim that therapy (as it stands now) makes them worse for this reason, they get better at faking.

Not to say we should give up, just saying it's not a simple thing to approach.
Negative Mass An amusing thought experiment, or the Secret of the Universe?
Well, if the return on capital employed in having a breadboard sitting in a store room is less than other investments why should anyone do that?

Everyone in a free market tends to try and maximize there own profits - which isn't the same thing as "utilize every opportunity of profit".
> This meme needs to die ... The cognitive bias is so painfully blatant: "the guy I disagree with is a liar bullshitting idiots, or is an idiot himself"? Come on.

Cognitive bias? Why restate the assertion with loaded terms?

Are you saying that it is not intellectually dishonest to equate copyright infringement with theft? Theft deprives its victim of property.
My dad used it a lot when I was growing up. He raved about it always and to this day thinks it's the best system he ever used.
So the stereotype of the granola-eating outdoorsy Coloradian must be true...
I think, and I could be wrong, but it seems like there is a mistake in your markup.

The Good Day link executes "javascript: rateUp(id);"
The Bad Day link executes "javascript: rateMiddle(id);"
And the LMAO link executes "javascript: rateDown(id);"

This could be all well and good, it just seemed odd to me.

Otherwise I like this site, might have to waste some time there.
I don't think that is a problem. Part of the price of the OS goes into the codec.

Open Solaris tries to get around this, by getting you to pay for the codec after install.

Of course not paying is the ideal outcome, for most consumers.
i intend to look again this evening - i may well have made a mistake, but i couldn't understand what was happening (i am on linux, restarted firefox, and also restarted nscd; i didn't modify hosts, but did add a master record for the domain to my local network's name server - "host" and firefox were, apparently, inconsistent) (i was so surprised i went into the code and checked it was using a name and not a numerical address...)
I disagree about the Tao Te Ching not being a religious book. It is the primary book of Taoism.

"The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao"

That is a paraphrase from memory of the opening of the book. Which seems to me a lot like the Jewish refusal to speak the formal name for God because it is too holy and they couldn't speak it truthfully.
> The US has significantly less red tape involved in building out nationwide infrastructure than countries like Sweden, Japan, and South Korea.

I'd like to read about that. Do you have any links?
Considering this: HTC is a Taiwanese company. Taiwan has sane patent laws, unlike the US. So they're unlikely to have a large arsenal of frivolous patents.
This is why I've stopped reading comments on my Android games in the Marketplace every day.

The negative emotional toll from reading those data points is far too discouraging.

My "positive" data points are seeing how many downloads I'm getting every day. How many active installs I have, and I love loading up my "Orders" page to see that number grow.

BUT!! Every time I load up the comments in the Marketplace my stomach turns. I have buyers who LOVE my games, but for some reason the users of the free version shit all over it. It's hard to keep working on the next game when you read that slop.

So, I agree, we don't need to know EVERYTHING about our businesses, because the important stuff will bubble to the top, the rest can sink.

I know what you are going to say - I don't listen to my users, but please, tell me, how does reading a comment like "This game can eat my balls" help me in any way?

HOWEVER, comments like, "the game is off-screen on my N1" IS helpful, and it's reasons like this that I HAVE to read the comments every now and then. But it's rough.
And here am I, always thinking "piracy" was a term way too negative for what I like to call "copyism".
Gabriel vs Brooks
Wow, singer, dancer, and basketball player too. He will be missed.
I'll make a start to the best of my understanding so that at least more learned readers can correct me. In particular the Josephson phase qubit is beyond my ken, really, so take this with a pinch of salt.

They have a lump of material which will vibrate when driven with microwaves. The mechanical energy of this vibration is, like other forms of energy, quantised. They cool it down so they can distinguish the ground and first excited states.

The oscillator is piezoelectric, so they can get a current from it that depends on the frequency of the oscillation, and this enables it to be coupled to the qubit device.

The Josephson junction has two phases, superconducting and non-superconducting. The junction in a circuit behaves like an oscillating circuit. Transitions between these phases occur at certain resonant frequencies which depend on the current applied. The resonant frequencies are quantised and you can have a superposition of the states, and that's why this is a qubit. The splitting between these quantum states depends on the current.

Coupling the piezoelectric oscillator with the qubit allowed them to drive a circuit at frequencies that could change the qubit state. Conversely, the state of the qubit can set the vibrational state of the oscillator. Since you
can set the qubit in a superposition of the ground and first excited state, the ground and first excited states of the oscillator i.e. not vibrating and vibrating, are also superposed.
Objectives-Constrained Design - not Capacity-Constrained Design
A recent blog post I made - thought this would be interesting to (or resonate with) the YC audience :)
Don't punish your users by launching your site without load testing. It's easy to simulate load. Do it before launching.
In general I agree not to optimize prematurely; however, the system needs to design upfront to have the proper layering and choke points, otherwise retrofitting the code to add caching in will be difficult.
I don't understand. Why not start with caching, then do all those things you mentioned when the site bogs down again? It'll be after all the same queries, the same rendering etc. post-cache; the same technique to improve them will work in the presence of cache.

So why not start with caching, especially if it buys you a large chunk of time to prepare the other stuff?
"Since the data points are solely about extreme wealth and Elite MBAs, the only thing that can be proven is some degree of correlation between the two. What you have is insufficient (by a lot) to prove causation."

The conventional wisdom is that there is causation as well as correlation. Everyone who goes to one of those elite MBA schools- and a lot of smart people do- goes because they believe in causation as well as correlation. The burden of proof is on you, to show that there is no causation, because the conventional wisdom says the exact opposite. See also:

"One who wishes to believe says, “Does the evidence permit me to believe?” One who wishes to disbelieve asks, “Does the evidence force me to believe?” Beware lest you place huge burdens of proof only on propositions you dislike, and then defend yourself by saying: “But it is good to be skeptical.” If you attend only to favorable evidence, picking and choosing from your gathered data, then the more data you gather, the less you know. If you are selective about which arguments you inspect for flaws, or how hard you inspect for flaws, then every flaw you learn how to detect makes you that much stupider." - http://yudkowsky.net/rational/virtues

"If your thesis is that the Elite MBA led to the extreme wealth, you have to look at the volumes of Elite MBAs out there. HBS alone turns out 1000 a year. Only a small % of them get to extreme wealth (going back to your point that a few hundred million doesn't count)."

Agreed, but that's a lot larger than the percentage of people who "learn how to hack" that go on to extreme wealth.
sorry, I used the bookmarklet and was counting on url detection, I was actually surprised it went through.

I've actually discovered that submitting things is the least effort method of finding discussions, since a duplicate submission counts as an upvote and delivers you to the comment thread.
At some point, they begin to trade off against one another. A free state can't easily hold as an empire, because the people have to be coerced into putting the empire's interests above their own.

We're able to be an empire while remaining nominally democratic because corporations-- authoritarian economic institutions-- hold most of the actual power... and it's the corporations that do the dirtiest of the dirty work, not the government.
Emailing that zip file would probably break most mail based virus checkers. I doubt the people who wrote them anticipated an infinite zip file. Too large, sure, but infinite? Probably not.
Uh-Oh.

You can't just say "I don't sell to Canadians" and therefore avoid GST and the CRA.

The last thing he should be looking for is an expensive audit.
When I'm writing programs for myself, sometimes I make the perl program write itself out as the config file with a config hash as the __data__. When the program runs, it tests if the config file doesn't exist or is an older version of the program. I don't know if it has any real use, but it's fun to write :D
I once read that bands should not list CBGB as an achievement because of the sheer number of acts that perform there. It makes me wonder if that is intended as a humorous comment.

Regardless, my musical career never took me that far.
I agree that behaviors are caused by physical states. However, stating that people who behave in a fundamentally different way aren't physically different is misguided. Every person is physically different. The difficulty is that unless there are gross brain lesions, it's very hard to see what makes people with psychopathy different. It might be a slight difference in the sensitivity of key neurons to one of twenty neurotransmitters, for example, or a slightly different pattern of connections in one region.

Psychology (like many sciences) is all about developing reliable abstractions for these complex physical states. The surprising thing is that it works: you can change the neurotransmitter balance of the brain in many cases just by sitting down and talking to people for a year.
I've had zipped files that are too compressed break mail-based virus checkers. Their typical response is to kill the checking process if it takes too much time/memory and not deliver the mail.
Dude, I saw Dan_Sim's comment below and I think you're headed for a world of hurt pretending that you are GST exempt if you ignore Canadians.

You need to speak with an accountant - if CRA decides to audit you (as they would seeing that you are declaring income with no GST remittance) you could be in a world of hurt.

See here: http://blog.9thsphere.com/blog/are-you-billing-gst-correctly...

Oh, and your list makes me feel unworthy. :-)
The author commits a fallacy by only listing companies that are successful and have bad design and not listing those who were unsuccessful and had bad design.

You could make similar arguments about source control, unit testing or bug tracking. Plenty of companies succeed despite not having them and they're not crucial to success but it can make or break in a large amount of marginal cases.

Despite that, the article is making an important point and having a conversation I don't see designers having very often.
Verizon delays Android 2.1 rollout to Motorola Droid
What developers need to always understand is that the PM's
view is the business's view.

The PM's view is the business's view colored by the PM's preconceptions. Good PMs will defer on technical decisions and be firm on business decisions. Bad PMs won't.

If developers have a tough time with developing Windows Forms and would rather use Python daily, they should found a start-up and create a business that is inline with a developer's view.

That's one way to do it. Another good way is to communicate with the PM/business in language that speaks to them (cost/savings, time to build, maintenance costs, etc.) and make the case for Python (or whatever).

Interesting thought:
* Poor developers will pick their technology irrespective of the problem at hand.
* Good developers will pick the most appropriate tool given the problem at hand.
* Great developers look at the problem at hand and write whatever tools from the ground up they need in their chosen technology to make it happen. (See: 37signals with Ruby, developed Rails. Django with The World Company, etc.)
Oh, good. They found the hyper-intelligent shade of blue from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

(Actually, Google does the same kind of color testing.)
My use of "concrete types" was merely a proxy for any code upon which client code should not have an explicit dependency.

I don't see interfaces and plugins as being orthogonal at all, you can't very well have plugins without interfaces (it wouldn't be much of a plugin if the client depended on the "plugin" itself). Besides, orthogonal vectors don't get you to the same place. ;-)

In my opinion, the defining feature of a plugin is that it can be loaded and used with no modification of the code that uses it. On architectures with dynamic loading, this means you can drop a DSO somewhere and use it without code modification or relinking. "Factories", as usually described, would require some modification of the factory to support this new implementation (perhaps just a single line). A "factory" with a runtime-extensible list of implementations that it knows about, is a plugin architecture, but a plugin architecture need not look anything like a factory.
Tough Coatings for Airplanes
Nobody could have done that much earlier because the pieces were not in place. No web technology was invented before the web.

1-click appeared pretty much at the same time someone had the idea of storing credit card information on a web server.
I think that's unlikely. Microsoft filed an amicus brief in the Bilski case last year that made it clear they fully support software patents:
http://www.patentlyo.com/am-brief.pdf
Metropolis and Asado are kind of hard to get to if you don't live on the North Side. Intelligentsia is nice for those of us who live/work in the loop.
So? Mozilla is making a fair amount of money now. It's a big expense to license, but it's not an unobtainable one. Part of being a big player is sometimes paying out to license the best technology.

Mozilla is asking us to side with them based purely on ideology and an impact to their bottom line as a corporation. And Mozilla is not a tiny garage operation anymore.
Weird. This took forever to load, caused Chrome to crash, then my computer blue screened. Probably just a local problem..but did anyone else get weird loading behavior in Chrome at least?

edit: loads up in firefox 3.6 no problem. I'm on windows 7 64bit.
Confessions of a Debt Collector
Not really. All that he's done is given an intuitive reason that the functor Powerset from Set to Set is monadic. This is not a demonstration of monads in general!
How Do You Charge?
The only four types of classes an OO system needs
Sexy Japanese Girls on Black Box Magazine Cover
Its the sexy Japanese girls who covers on the cover page of Japan wide distributed Black Box Magazine for the month of March 2010.
Poot Poot
Pootpoot Poot Poot is poot to poot, poot
The discrepancy in wealth between Western and Eastern Europe is due largely to the Marshall Plan (Eastern bloc states couldn't accept the aid). Without it, Britain would have struggled to rebuild its economy (and Britain was very poor in the '50s). So the "American Era" effectively began with the conclusion of World War 2.

World War 1 was the sign that imperialism might not be such a good idea, since it led to an effectively pointless war, but it didn't change the relative levels of power. World War 2 occurred because certain societies didn't learn this lesson and became even more monstrous than the old imperial powers. After it, imperialism essentially died in Europe, but was unfortunately reborn in the US corporate complex.
Gladwell cites a study as only one component of "Outliers." The study itself is the subject of an entire book called "Talent is Overrated." This book should actually be read before Gladwell (which is the order I did). An excerpt from the book is here:

http://money.cnn.com/2008/10/21/magazines/fortune/talent_col...
NPEs are not bad per se. Imagine I have invented (as in done the physics and made sure it's correct) energy generation process that requires a billion dollar device to be built. NPEs can invent things they can't really build.

The problem is not in NPEs. It's in bad patents. Ideas and processes should not be patentable. Period.