skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Misleading headline. Weight gain depends on how much calories you take and how much is burned. This two cannot be separated as suggested.

And the research was merely statistical, not biological: the average middle aged woman needs at least an hour a day to avoid weight gain. It might not hold for different age and gender groups, so unless you are an average middle aged woman, such a conclusion holds little weight with you.
This looks like yet another case of designers not "getting" the needs of anyone who wants to use the software for any length of time.

I took a gander at the comparison on http://www.portfolio.com/interactive-features/2007/06/termin... , and the whole article just annoys me. If they could focus less on "oh dear, this isn't going to win any design award" and more on making the software more efficient to use, I am confident they would not have faced the wholesale rejection that they complain about.

The current design is easy on the eyes. A black background with bright text is easier on the eyes than a glaring white flashlight with some thin black text on it. (I wonder if the misconception that dark background is bad stems from print, where it is a legitimate complaint?) Fun test: try using each of black-on-white and white-on-black at 3AM with bloodshot eyes and see which one gives you a pounding headache and which one allows you to focus on your work.

The current design is compact, and uses nice color-contrast techniques to group regions, while the "improved design" wastes a ton of pixels for spacing between the regions instead. Less eye-travel, less scrolling, less next-page-ing makes for more efficient (and therefore more relaxed) use.
Using the author's terminology: the last two, the h-list and the d-list, ought to have O(1) insertion anywhere too. Since he calls removal at any position O(1) he must already have a pointer to the desired item. Also, this implies that insertion anywhere is O(1) in all four list types.
I don't understand why this article doesn't mention how much these women were eating. From my understanding, the number of calories eaten is just as large of a factor in weight regulation (if not more) as exercise.
Yeah, all the last Google products have been firmly in the 'miss' category, but no matter how much Buzz or Wave suck, Reader and Gmail too awesome to stop using.

But - I did turn off every single sharing feature in all Google apps I do use, I don't have a public profile, etc. Better safe than sorry.
Two little errors:

(1): Even for a non-coder, there is a small difference between proprietary and free: vendor dependency.

(2): Even if makers of free software themselves can be sneaky, malicious code is less likely to slip through, thanks to peer review. (Of course this doesn't apply to one person projects.)

The conclusion, however, is right on spot: what really matters is control of data. Free software is just a mean. An indispensable one, but a mean nonetheless.
I'll bet their market research is fun...

However there are real challenges in having a company like that on your resume. A couple of (male) co-workers of mine were interviewing an attractive woman who had been doing brand management for K-Y jelly. They managed to hold it together for a while. Then they lost it when she began blithely talking about how their advertising campaign lead to increased (market) penetration.

Yeah, my co-workers should have been more mature. But I'll bet that was not the first or last time she got that kind of response. (Hopefully she learned to be more careful of the potential double-entendres.)
tried out netvibes recently. it's designed to be more of a polished igoogle but you can use it only for feeds and it works well.
I don't really get this article. Dennehy writes:

However, while Dyer was making a point based on insufficient reliability and robustness in the available tools, Spolsky is making the same assertion purely on the basis that it takes more time to produce a good design than to use a simpler tool and “duct tape” a solution.

This is not an accurate reflection of Spolsky's article. In particular there is this paragraph:

One principle duct tape programmers understand well is that any kind of coding technique that’s even slightly complicated is going to doom your project. Duct tape programmers tend to avoid C++, templates, multiple inheritance, multithreading, COM, CORBA, and a host of other technologies that are all totally reasonable, when you think long and hard about them, but are, honestly, just a little bit too hard for the human brain.

Added: Spolsky is not claiming that these techniques take too much time. He is claiming that it is very hard to use these techniques to make a product that is reliable and robust.

My reading of Spolsky is that he is making the claim that is it a good idea to have programmers on your team who are very focussed on shipping product, and don't really care whether the technology being used is particularly advanced or popular. They just want to do whatever it takes to ship.

I think he's right; it's good to have these people around. Programmers love learning about new technologies and programming techniques, and when we learn about them we want to apply them. Our enthusiasm can push us to use technology that isn't really required for the problem at hand, and when that technology is difficult to use correctly, this can cause big problems. Having someone around keep you focussed on what matters - shipping a working product - is very helpful.
Go to sparkfun. It won't last long.
I deactivated Buzz. It seems Google's so desperate to enter the social advertising market that they're inconveniencing their users so much, so I refuse to use Buzz for this simple reason. Google doesn't know what's best for me. I do. They need to stop forcing me to use things I don't want. If I want to use them, I'll turn them on, or request them.
The notion that there's only one kind of "good" programmer strikes me as very shallow. The way that everyone's vision of good programmer seems to align with "just like me" is egotistical as well. Is there just one kind of good writer? One kind of good chef? One kind of good lover?

Sure, there are some traits that generally correlate with good programmers (clear thinking, love of scientific method, intellectual honesty) and some traits that generally correlate with bad programmers (magical thinking, forgetfulness) but after working with many, many different kinds of programmers, I've found that there's more than one way that works and having different kinds of people on your team is a good thing. Monoculture leads to groupthink and groupthink is an innovation killer.

I like to think that I'm a good programmer (not great like some people I know, but whatever). I'm good at the kind of work that I choose to do, but I'm aware that there are all sorts of scenarios that I'm not right for. I once left a job after just a few months because the technology/team/culture fit just wasn't right; to that group, I surely wasn't a good programmer.
Not the right DOI, but this article from last year covers the same territory:
http://www.pnas.org/content/106/30/12323.full

The article from the current issue that best matches the discussion in the ARS article is here:
http://www.pnas.org/content/107/9/4051.abstract?sid=dfaf11ad...

Can't find the article cited at the DOI link is broken.
Chrome Incognito windows or Firefox private browsing are also useful for multiple logins.
We all knew they were doing this, but for some reason, reading the actual guidelines is chilling.

I can only imagine the people who wrote this and expanded lots of mental energy in trying to make sure that their propaganda/censorship plan was as airtight as possible...
Oh man, after watcher waveride, the constant rotation really messed with my mind for a few seconds there. totality awesome, great job. now release the hounds... i mean code
In my ~/.vimrc:

set textwidth=80
The RSS reader built into opera is great. I have been using it for a couple years and would not switch to anything else. I used to use reader but it is far to slow in comparison.
In the case of Photoshop I think it's more that an established system with a large userbase can't significantly change its UI without significant negative feedback (see Office Ribbon).

The pallet interface is also what we're used to. Most people, were they to set out to build a pixel pusher app, would start with a basic pallet UI. Unless of course they were specifically aiming to get away from that.

Also, Photoshop is a perfect example of "The more painful the UI is, the more satisfied these users are".
How does one "miss a paragraph"?

What a unclever excuse for missing the point.
Heh, "no soup for you!"
How many devices do you need to read your RSS feed on anyway? For me it's only my desktop machines and occasionally my phone. That's a pretty low barrier to entry for a new feed reader.

I'm not buying the huge ecosystem argument at all. The problem with the direction Google is taking—not to mention Twitter—is that there is a huge fad fun factor at work here. It's fun to play around with this stuff, but how much useful information can you get out of it? Sure, Twitter is some people's bread and butter (pro bloggers...), RSS is much more powerful for domain experts, for some people all they can really make use of is email.

Personally I think Google Buzz is too late to cash in on the Twitter fad. It's solving Google's business problem, not users'. It'll probably settle into its niche like the rest of Google's stuff, but they'll have to fix this heavy-handed integration stuff.
h-list is only advantageous for hash tables if the links are in-element. Generalized hash tables would probably use s-list. But I like the terminology.
The main thing is if calories eaten == calories burned, then you should maintain a stable weight. Exercise helps in this equation because it raises your metabolism (as well as other benefits), which in turn burns more calories.
".NET creates value from a fantastic IDE, great mainstream languages, and well-executed technologies like Silverlight, LINQ and the DLR [Dynamic Language Runtime]."

Silverlight is well executed? Is there any real uptake with the DLR outside Silverlight? I think the answer to both is no, can anyone point to evidence otherwise?
Thanks for the reminder. I just torched Buzz as well.
as he said, solidifying the brand. specifically: i get the feeling a lot of developers here want to be all knowing of the "cool new thing." many of them think thats DDG, and a DDG email address would be a badge they show off. I know for sure if I switched from my gmail address a TON of people would ask me why and what the hell DDG was.
Same with Drupal: create a type (using the web interface or via code) and you get free admin forms.
I don't see how Wave can suck when it's not even implemented completely yet. It would be like complaining that Email sucked back in '73 because no one used it.
I think he was being overly optimitic in the first place. Microsoft doesn't want a cross platform system. They were just throwing out a bone with C#. Having their tools be truly cross platform is not in their best business interest, and no one blames them. Miguel should have understood this when he started Mono.
But this is not trying to address a duplication problem as far as I can see (see below):

E.g. let's say I have the following blocks of data:

A B C D E F...

And I then change C to C', now having:

A B C' D E F...

With the rsynccrypto approach the ciphertext of D E and F... will be unchanged, allowing rsync to do the right thing (not retransmit everything after C').

Yeah, this leaks info, but it's a compromise between a making the result easier to break and conserving transmission costs (which is very much an issue for me, being stuck behind a slow upstream residential ADSL link).

My question, which I have most definately not answered to my complete satisfaction, is "has the cryptosystem been compromised to the point I might as well have not bothered?"

Just how easy will the know leaks make a attack feasible? How expensive would be such an attack be? I.e. I'm not concerned about the NSA, a lesser degree of security is OK.

As for deduplication, I don't see how it can help; could you be more specific?

(And thanks a lot for taking this issue seriously, it is something I'm concerned about and don't have a sufficient background to be all that confident about my judgment.)
Have you thought about bundling some canonical example graphs and using it as a teaching tool for graph theory?

(I'm already working on a similar project. Feel free to shoot me an email at the address in my profile if you want to talk about it.)
Few of the examples you listed are arbitrary, in fact Crockford describes precisely why he chose them as conventions. In nearly all cases he came up with these conventions to help coders avoid common pitfalls due to unfortunate aspects of the JavaScript language.

function foo(){
myGlobal = "foo";
}

var myGlobal;

This is clear if you only have this one function, but with a large js file I know I'd rather not be searching through the code for global variables. That's also why "Inner functions should follow the var statement", it's an easy way to keep track of scope.

"Do not use _ (underbar) as the first character of a name. It is sometimes used to indicate privacy, but it does not actually provide privacy. "
It's private because you weren't invited to use it, not because I have a bomb waiting for you.

No, it's private because it throws an error if you try to use it outside of the proper scope. From what I can tell about Python, for example, adding underbars enforces privacy, JavaScript doesn't.

"Global variables should be in all caps."
umm, no. That convention is reserved for constants.

That convention in other languages is for constants. Crockford points out that js doesn't have constants. He also constantly points out the dangers of global variables, how you should minimize their use. The purpose of all caps is to give a visual cue that they're global, the purpose of all caps in other languages is to give a visual cue that they're constants.

"Each group of statements (except the default) should end with break, return, or throw. Do not fall through."
Arbitrary. I think DRY is preferable when it's warranted.

Crockford used to think the same. He tells the story of a user who suggested fall-through should be flagged by JSLint. Crockford gave him a detailed response explaining that there was nothing wrong with fall-through. The user agreed, and included a bug report for JSLint in his response. Crockford found the bug in JSLint and it was caused by... fall-through.

"Avoid doing assignments in the condition part of if and while statements. "
It's a legitimate convention if wrapped with an extra pair of parenthesis. Note that Mozilla's strict mode will honor this convention.

Crockford points out the problems you can run into doing that:

Is

if (a = b) {

a correct statement? Or was

if (a == b) {

intended?

It's easy enough to tell if you're the one who wrote it, but what happens to the poor sorry schlub who's trying to debug the code later on (especially if that schlub is you 6 months later)?
My favorite thing ever is the Google Reader "next" bookmarklet. It lets me use a RSS reader without ever needing to actually go to Google Reader.
I find the whole 'drive to the gym' concept kind of funny from a cynical sense.

These folks are going to drive to the gym and then run on a treadmill facing a brick wall?
I recently bought a recumbent bike for $215. It mostly nullifies the time expense. I can still read and work on my laptop, albeit at a less productive pace. I've been doing 3 hours a day for the past two months. (I broke my wrist so can't do much else with my time.) I have never felt so healthy.
Simple, usable and profitable
It's odd that certain societies don't value discovering or reporting the truth, but instead attempt to create it.
Emacs or vi won't win any design awards, yet it is the editor of choice for a lot of hackers, and not just because of machismo.

This is because (A) there is more to design and usability than visual design, and (B) some systems design should be optimized for the expert user, not the general user.
This is correct. But my point is that while exercise is a contributor, it isn't the only factor in weight loss. So for this article to conclude that people need to exercise for an hour a day in order to avoid weight gain without mentioning how much they were eating seems very incomplete.
Richard Stallman's article (http://bostonreview.net/BR35.2/stallman.php) is definitely worth a read.

But I have a problem with the solution that he proposes, that software should be peer-to-peer capable to allow for collaboration, because that ignores all the other reasons why SaaS is so useful. I use Google Docs primarily because I can get at it anywhere.

The way I see it, the future lies in self-hosted web based software, or at least web interfaces to desktop software. Sure not everyone would use this (think wordpress.com vs. wordpress.org) but then at least you'd have the ability to control your own data.
Exactly. Just another blog post by someone who doesn't understand why. Not everything can be web 2.0'd, bubbly and made into an iPhone app.
I thought Miguel was Mr. "there is no legal threat, Mono is fine."

Example from 05:

"Every piece of software written today is likely going to infringe on someone else's patent... Our strategy in dealing with patents in Mono is the same strategy that any other software developer would take."

http://ondotnet.com/pub/a/dotnet/2005/03/21/interviewmiguel....
JooJoo tablet shipping to US by Monday, 29th March
There are no direct effects, but there are indirect/secondary effects. For example you won't find OSS nagware/crippleware/popupware because any developer knows someone else will just cut the annoying parts out. Or you personally may not program python, but you do benefit from using python programs.
Sure thing, I've considered adding that. But since it is not directly related to the stack/queue/etc split, I kept it out for the sake of simplicity.
Your new office looks great! Nice job with the layout, and a cute puppy too.
Pride in their ability and job security are two reasons why people may prefer such user interfaces. Some complex user interfaces may also give people the perception of having more control.

These statements are incorrect. Command line interfaces (black background, in my case green text instead of the article's yellow) often give more control and are more usable than "simple" GUI ones. Especially for complex systems, it becomes unwieldy when a GUI interface tries to provide graphical settings for every supported feature. There are a bajillion tabs and windows, and while the UI designer though of several brilliant one word descriptions for each settings section/tab, of course they're not completely accurate for the setting which you're looking, and you end up flipping through way to many tabs/windows.
1. The people for whom "Write readable code" is sufficient guidance are the same people for whom that guidance isn't needed in the first place.

2. For a body of code written by multiple people to be readable, it helps considerably if the conventions those people follow are consistent. A document like this one can help with that.

3. It doesn't seem reasonable to expect that the author of a document like this should provide all the counter-arguments to every position he takes. It's not an in-depth analysis of what constitutes good JavaScript code, it's just a set of coding conventions.
New Digg-Clone Thuhm Updates Design and Added Features
I work 9-5(ish) and go to the company gym after work with a friend every day. We do weight lifting and then usually a 2 mile run. By the time we leave the gym, it's been 1.5 hours, and I get back to my place around 7-7:30pm, depending on traffic, and still have to eat and shower before I can get to other things.

I'll admit, it's been difficult and can seem like a chore, but going with someone else is a real motivator - you don't want to let the other person down. In addition to a higher level of fitness, I always leave the gym feeling energized and happy.
Typographers have known this for quite some time. It's called "measure" and it should be around 65-75 characters (according to the typographer's bible, The Elements of Typographical Style by Binghurst: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Elements_of_Typographic_Sty...)
That's ugly (IMHO) and not a good idea in js where semicolons are optional...

For all we know it may execute 'document' as a statement, and then the next lines.

Not nice IMHO

If you can fit 160 chars on the display, use 160.
Email did suck in 73, I'm sure.

Saving Wave sucks now is true.

This isn't a forecast.
an arduino, an arduino book if necessary, and the rest on whatever parts you want to buy to build something.
Mine got 'hacked' a couple months back. Too bad I had stopped playing 2 years earlier and their attempt to charge character transfers were on an expired card. But now I get no end of junk emails about how I need to secure my non-existent WoW account.
Found it. Thanks.
Clearly this isn't popular here but I stand by it. The Internet and everything about it is the new printed word, book, newspaper, radio and tv. And so organizations will try to control every aspect of it. If Orwell rewrote 1984 as 2084 I'm sure there would be a few lines about how the Protect Information Everywhere Act of 2020 outlawed end user content modification by outlawing programs like greasemonkey. Doubleplus ungood indeed.
Google now indexes over 1 billion Facebook URLs
Fun Facts: Ben and Alyssa make appearances in Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, and in Sussman's supercool symbolic programming class: http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/gjs/6.945/

"Alyssa P Hacker" is a pun on "A Lisp Hacker". She has a friend named Imelda Macros.
I also wonder what "fantastic IDE" he is referring to. I constantly hear people talk about visual studio being great but I don't believe they have ever stepped outside their world to try some of the Java IDEs like IntelliJ IDEA.
A fantastic console newsreader is newsbeuter.

http://newsbeuter.org/

Highly configurable, and you can set vi keybindings.
Tell me how China can democratize tomorrow without massive social upheaval. Is it going to be another 30 years?

I don't think the Letter From a Birmingham Jail is a soundbite, nor a "bullshit passionate appeal". It's worth reading in full: http://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham.h...
Does this add anything above and beyond the already included developer tools, which I already access with ctrl+shift+I and ctrl+shift+J (on the Linux dev channel)?
It is interesting that Google is acting like a start-up company - I give them credit for pushing this stuff out, but it's easy to see why beasts like Microsoft stagnated for so long considering the litany of issues you run into as a mature business with tens-of-millions of users . . .
It looks like they were doing single-cell recording in humans. Almost certainly, these were epileptic patients being prepped for surgery, because that's almost the only time when scientists have access to data from invasive recording techniques. Ah, yes:

"The subjects were nine patients who were evaluated for possible surgical treatment of epilepsy using implantation of depth electrodes."

As a result, it's pretty typical to have small sample sizes like this. It's certainly possible to achieve statistical significance with this few subjects.
For a body of code written by multiple people to be readable, it helps considerably if the conventions those people follow are consistent.

I'm not convinced of this (at least it doesn't hold true for me). I used to believe it, mostly because it seems to be common wisdom. But I've realized over time that I can just as easily read code that's written using K&R style braces, or BSD style, or even Whitesmiths, and it really doesn't matter to me whether indentation is 2, 4, or 8 spaces.

I think some of my point of view comes from being a heavy Emacs user and having written a lot of Lisp code in the past. I don't tend to see braces/parens much for example - I let the editor take care of them.