skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
With all respect to this author and this piece -- it was well done and he makes many salient points. There are some topics on HN that are just starting to bore the hell out of me. Apple fanboy-ism, or not. C++: it's complicated so it's bad. Famous person X says this about famous person/product Y. And bitching about OOP.

Look. OOP is just the use of categorization and set theory to organize code and data. It doesn't have to involve a lot wiring things together, it doesn't have to mean tremendously huge class diagrams before coding, and it is absolutely not related to one particular language. I can use OOP techniques in any language, and to the degree they're necessary, I should. It's just a tool.

I understand that the OOP movement got way overblown and annoying, but we as technologist are always making overly-broad generalizations of anything we do. There's a tremendous amount of selection bias that goes on in technology, most of it hidden. I remember in one of my early contracting jobs we had a PM who was a FoxPro programmer. No matter what the problem we were talking about, somehow he would feel that FoxPro was the best answer for that problem.

At the time I thought he was unique -- sort of a joke. Looking back over many years of observing technologists, however? He was the rule, not the exception. At the risk of stating the obvious we only understand those things we have familiarity with. This means if you haven't programmed in OOP, or if you've had extensive experience with OOP and you know somebody at the same experience level with different opinions, you should try very hard to have an open mind and learn something from somebody else. It's very easy to make broad claims that are unsupported by anything but a small set of observations.

Saying "Are we still doing OOP?" is like saying "Are we still using categorization and set theory" which sounds to me a LOT like "Are we still using arithmetic?"

The question is nonsensical.
It appears that you can fix that now in the privacy settings.

That said, I still consider the initial "outing" of fan pages to be a huge breach of trust.
From Urban Dictionary:

A person who posts on a blog thread, in the guise of "concern," to disrupt dialogue or undermine morale by pointing out that posters and/or the site may be getting themselves in trouble, usually with an authority or power. They point out problems that don't really exist. The intent is to derail, stifle, control, the dialogue. It is viewed as insincere and condescending.
This is a take I found on modern Buddhism view on science http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bhmaK4Q19RY

Though it's only a few minute spot directed rather to non-tech people, it scratches the surface.
The Basics of Web Advertisment Tracking
You'll notice that in the first paragraph there, he says:

> Python supports all of Lisp's essential features except macros, and you don't miss macros all that much because it does have eval, and operator overloading, and regular expression parsing, so some--but not all--of the use cases for macros are covered.

Macros are a huge part of Lisp. Were they not, I don't think you'd see Lisp programmers defending the bare bones not-syntax so fiercely.

For what it's worth, if you get good at a language, you start decomposing things into trees yourself when you're faced with some tricky code.
I'm coining "speed chess programming".

Getting a bunch of programmings together to hack out a quick project with limited time to think about your next move.
"Saying "Are we still doing OOP?" is like saying "Are we still using categorization and set theory" which sounds to me a LOT like "Are we still using arithmetic?""

OO is hardly equivalent, and not as fundamental (or anywhere near fundamental) as Set Theory, leave alone Arithmetic. The implied equivalence is misleading.

You can use "categorization" and Set theory to design programs with never an Object in sight.

Types and (mathematical) functions are both defined using Set Theory as are Relations (as in relational databases). You could program in Haskell with only types and functions and monads and such with no "object oriented design". The primary difficulty for people who've only done (what some call) "OOP" is forgetting all the OO technique they learned.

At best you could say that objects (for various definitions of "OO") could also be expressed with Sets and (mathematical) functions and such. ALmost every programming language feature could be so expressed, that isn't saying much.

There is no specifically "Object Oriented" super technique that transcends all languages (both OO and non OO) and is applicable in all of them. You'd be cutting against the grain of many languages if you tried to think in OO while using them. LIke Fortan, you can write "OO" in any language and it isn't always a good thing to do.

Not defending the author of TFA ( I don't read these "Ohh technique X or language Y is so outdated" type of articles any more) but the sentence quoted (' "Are we using OO" is lik e "Are we using Set Theory" ') is as generic and misleading as anything the author claimed. Balance in all things.
How to keep your Tweetie timeline “Lost” spoiler-free
Following Joel's advice may or may not make you better off. Can't really tell without going into technical specifics. Can you tell us more about your case?

Our current product (online mapping for corporate clients) went through multiple rewrites when it was already quite successful: the client side went from JavaScript to AS2 then to AS3, the server side went from PHP to C#, and in addition to that many big parts of the project were rewritten from scratch multiple times. None of this was ever done just to "incorporate best practices", though.
I had not noticed that the scale bar on Google Maps constantly changes as you scroll around (not just zoom in and out) due to the Mercator projection. Interesting article.
Right so you mean that in response to my saying that he shouldn't have dragged his (ex?)employer in to it ?

It was completely sincere and I don't give a rats ass about whether you, PG or anybody else for that matter believe me or not.

It wouldn't be the first time I receive an email a day after an exchange like that when it turned out someone was roaring drunk behind the keyboard.

This comment is the one that prompted it:

"Please -- the company that bought is vista and can't even get critical patches for 0days out in less than a month?"

I can't even parse that. So I suspected the OP may not have been entirely sober. I can't tell from here of course so that's purely speculative but people that post with the names of their employers in their comments should be a bit more circumspect of how they present their arguments.

Feel free to disagree, as you can see above you're in good company. But that won't stop me from speaking my mind.

I wonder if the 'no name calling' on HN goes for the boss himself as well.
"old guy" =?=> "not a cultural fit"

There might be a correlation - older people may already have locally wrong opinions that are harder to change.
WordPress Tricks : Plugins that Must Use | Tricks And Tips Window
I have just two really simple bug fixes to be completed, and there is no more work assigned to me yet.
But I just can't bring myself to complete it. I have been very lazy for the past 2-3 days :(
I went to pandora.com for the first time in years. It immediately started playing a song from a band that I have a fan page for on Facebook. I was not logged into Pandora.

There was the blue Facebook bar on top saying that Pandora is connected with my Facebook. I could click no to disable it.

There is a special service that Pandora, yelp and a few others are using. It is on by default and opt-out.

Not very private if you ask me.
Yep - you are totally right. I will probably rework the video to talk about how the software can really save your time and hassle.
This. The granular privacy controls were a good thing when they defaulted toward the side of privacy. The problem is that Facebook has increasingly been adding new features and new privacy options while defaulting them to being world-viewable.

What has people angry isn't that the privacy settings are complex; it's that Facebook has essentially used the increasing complexity to pull a bait and switch with their privacy of the past few years.
This gives me an idea actually. What if submissions actually did start at 0, costing submitters 1 karma to submit?

It would have a chilling effect on submissions that would bias them toward stories that are obviously suited to HN, since a submitter would want to get back at least the point he lost.

Also, it would prevent brand new accounts from submitting, and skew submissions away from newbies and toward veterans of HN, since vets will have significantly more karma. That means people who know what HN is and have been around HN for a while would be more likely to submit than the other people who aren't clear on the guidelines and cultural norms yet.
I use this JQuery Bookmarklet Creator all the time: http://benalman.com/code/test/jquery-run-code-bookmarklet/
Tech innovation favours the rich
Thanks. I hadn't considered using the age of these other services as any sort of indicator.
Startup School TV
I am not so sure what you mean by "non-spammy way".
As an avid twitter user, I would certainly mind it if the people I follow start tweeting ads on my timeline. Actually clicking on these ads is just out of the question.
But then again, I am not speaking from the perspective of either of your customers: The ad publishers or the advertisers.
Then, what DOES prevent age and sex discrimination lawsuits?
I've seen a few of those in the last few days.

There was another phenomenon like that:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1369294

No links at all, you could only upvote it.
Make it 5. Or even 10.

And wipe the karma slate clean for everyone so old timers don't have an unfair advantage.
Clarification: you don't need an object to do OOP.

Here's a wonderful example. Let's say you're in C. You start writing code and continuously refactor as you go along. What most people find is, after a good bit of coding and refactoring, you end up with code grouped in modules with public and private functions, public and private data, etc. You can have data abstraction, encapsulation, modularity, polymorphism, and inheritance -- all to varying degrees, depending on the problem and solution.

OOP takes that categorization and set work and makes it part of the language. But programming in objects -- true OOP - does not require a language that provides objects. In fact, it's the other way around: because people programmed in objects, languages started providing that capability. Where folks get lost in the woods is where they think the language features are OOP instead of the conceptual work. Languages are just varying levels of syntactic sugar on top of the core tools.

Hope that clears it up for you
To be picky, it should be "URIs are the uniform way to locate resources", not "URLs" - software, web and general computer usage today extends beyond the typical scheme format of "protocol://address", f.e. handing out a Spotify URI to someone, clickable in their IRC client, or even directly pastable in their browser's address field: spotify:track:5IsPWc2uTiVINs3Lfn8s9o
There was some discussion about different licences for the codebase and the format. I'm not sure of the details but this is something the ffmpeg guys raised I think.

Given the (somewhat surprising, considering who it's coming from) lack of rigor in his other complaints, it's entirely possible this is a non issue. I guess we'll see.

edit:

The bitstream licence:
http://www.webmproject.org/license/bitstream/

The software licence:
http://www.webmproject.org/license/software/

Only the latter includes the phrase "this implementation of VP8" that is objected to, the former has the more general "implementations of this specification" in the same place.

What that actually means in legal theory or practice I have no idea.
My first visit here was in response to PG saying that I should submit something. Your scheme would prevent that.

Perhaps people should get sponsored, and the sponsor shares the first few karma points/hits. A newbie submits something, and an old-fart - sorry, long-standing contributor - can offer to sponsor it.

There are loads of schemes, but all require work, and all will have unintneded consequences. Yes, things could be better, but they could be worse.

Nostalgia these days is not as good as it was ...
Losing my life line... I hope you protect the friends you have.
This was a very big issue in my previous place of work. It really got to me, to the point that I actually quit and found another job. So, speaking from personal experience, it will also severely affect your programmers' morale if they just spend all their time doing little things on many different projects, rather than work on something big and worthwhile.

The solution: Get proper project management practises in place. Split up a project's work in quantums of atleast 3 days. Don't discuss other projects when your programmers are busy working on something.

po has an interesting point. Don't take very small projects which don't fit in your schedule. Another approach would be to talk and upgrade small projects to bigger projects and quote more time for them.
The Modern Business Plan
It's just regular, everyday tension of any two people in a power-sharing arrangement. Could happen to anybody, it's not sexist.
it seems to have a pool of test cases for each one, if you test it a few times you can try your luck against some different ones (including your 3 blues)
" But programming in objects -- true OOP - does not require a language that provides objects. "

Without getting into some mystical definition of "True OOP" You don't need any OOP to program or design.

"data abstraction, encapsulation, modularity, polymorphism, and inheritance"

None of these things (except inheritance maybe) is specific to OOP. All of them occur in all kinds of languages and paradigms with no objects or "OOP".

As to

" (with C programs) after a good bit of coding and refactoring, you end up with code grouped in modules with public and private functions, public and private data, etc. you end up with code grouped in modules with public and private functions, public and private data"

Sure if you refactor that way.

You could also end up with a collection of rules (as in Prolog) , polymorphic types and functions (as in Haskell), communicating processes (Occam/Erlang) etc with no "OOP" anywhere. (unless you want to claim any and all use of polymorphism or abstraction of any kind is indicative of some kind of all pervading mystical "True OOP" technique. There is no "True OOP" underlying all use of (say) abstraction or polymorphism).

I think people who've done only OO or primarily OO are as bad as people who've never done any OO or rarely do any OO in making outrageous claims.

Grandiose claims opposing or favoring specific subsets of programming technique [ example 1 --> "Are we still using OO?WTF" example 2 --> "Saying are we using OO is like saying are we using Arithmetic" don't stand up to scrutiny.

Objects are a useful abstraction. So are functions, logic staements, relations, processes, polymorphic types .. . Each in its place. (and balance in claims ;-) )
I've never heard of kanban. I'd make it more clear on the front page that it's a system developed by Toyota (I had to click the kanban link at the bottom of the page to learn that).

Knowing it's something to do with Toyota peaked my interest but having to click to another page lost my interest.

EDIT: In addition, it wasn't clear to me that the tabs at the top show more information. I assumed they would ask me to login so at first I didn't click them.
I like it well enough. Kanban is picking up steam and more and more tech teams are using it.

So how are you going to find customers?
"Is, say, finance-based capitalism sustainable in the medium term?"

In a forum nominally dedicated to the subject of angel and VC financed startups, I'd say that's germane as well.

Certainly advocates (at least somewhat) against that thesis are aiming directly at the heart and sinews of angel financing (Dodd's bill with the impossible regulatory regime as well as net worth increases).

Earlier in this decade they finished the run of VC based IPO financing that started in the late 1950s (expensing of stock options and SarBox)....
I altered the engine to stop rejecting @ and # characters, and now it looks even more like a proper teenager ;)
The link to the image stopped working -- here's a mirror: http://filevo.com/6ns7wvd07438.html
Maybe have a fixed number of submissions accepted per day and have people bid for acceptance?
Thanks! To be honest, I'm really quite scared by how often its tweets kinda-sorta make sense ;)
I thought we were talking about user submitted, geo-tagged photographs?
Well, Packages are a reader-hack, so you couldn't express them with parenthesis, although you should be able to IMHO.

#+FOO (bar)

This could almost be: (when (member FOO features) (bar))
Just wrap it in an eval-when.
You're welcome.

In the meantime, make sure to carry around one of your MOSIS chips, that earns you a lot of geek cred for those who know what it means ^_^.

(Seriously, it does.)
I'll admit that I don't know much about Node.js beyond the (very) basics, but if this (not having "the cost of a thread") is where Node.js shines, then this project might be very good on top of the .NET CLR 4.0. There's been a lot done under the hood to support async / parallel processing (specifically, reworking and optimizing the built-in ThreadPool, which is used for very short tasks to avoid "the cost of a thread").
Intel enters mobile arena
The best response would be to stop mucking with the information that your users want to be private.
There is at least one attempt at this called 'Sweet Expressions' still floating out on the web somewhere. It got horribly ripped by the c.l.l community. Personally, I don't see that it adds anything to the language but ambiguity. It's worth looking, however, at if you are interested in alternative syntaxes for Lisp.
The same arguments can be made for MS DOS, don't you forget. Something has to be said for being at the right place at the right time.
I get your second point (although I think desire to 'level up' is nothing particularly German) but 'land of spammers'?
Simple. Go to an Interesting Remote Place instead of a touristy place. I recommend Isle Royale in Lake Superior.
I don't appear to have that flag: votes I've made (both on comments and articles) still show up using a proxy in incognito mode while logged out.

I noticed yesterday that one of my submissions (I think it was http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1373034) was on 0 points according to my "submitted" page, but on 1 from /newest. My first guess is "something to do with caching", but I don't know.
A simple yet effective way to get free PR
I think everything in the Jobs section work that way - http://news.ycombinator.com/jobs
What if karma was gone? How strange to pursue points that have no intrinsic value, cannot be spent on anything, and mostly reflect how popular your opinion is and not its thoughfulness.
I looked on wikipedia...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanban

At least linking word kanban (first kanban word on page) with some page with explanations would be nice...
We do this. It works very well, eg:

http://www.infoworld.com/d/developer-world/jruby-upgrade-fea...

Journalists always ask about what you do, so make sure you have a good two-sentence pitch ready for them.
It wasn't my intention to say that "regulations" cause the problem, just that OUR regulation, as they stand, contribute. But it's not even my point, I'm just summarizing the article 8)
>>All of that said, if the code is a big mess 2.5 years in, then you probably have something else going wrong.

I can only say a lot of things have changed for the better. This applies to the env, developers and mgmt. More domain expertise have been acquired along the way.
Website Health Check: Keyword Blunders - Part 2
Website Health Check is becoming an integral part of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). The reason is that it helps to find mistakes in websites that are commonly unnoticed. Eventually, it means the difference between coming up as the first or last result in a search engine query.
i signed up in ten minutes.
I can't complain since I don't think hindu.com (or thehindu.com) specifically aims Neuroscientists who know Buddhism very well as their target audience.
"I'm in the middle of a course on precisely that subject as part of an M.A. in Buddhist Studies" - Are there any books, articles that are more insightful than the linked article that you would recommend ?
Were you supposed to reject a bot with .* BBB$ then? I never got that test case. I read the requirements as asking me to match .* BB$ and so I never tried to make it handle ^BB$|.* RBB$

(Edit: Added spaces so that the site doesn't turn my regexes into formatting.)
Computer is born Muslim
Sorry, but in one hour or less I'll know someone who'd done that was a poser vs. someone who has the real experience. E.g. what happens when I give him my "trivial" coding tests (for one class of jobs in the '90s that was write functions to reverse a linked list (pointers) and recursively compute the factorial of a number, plus find errors in a small block of code). Then depending on the position I'd ask him to do some design and at some point I'd ask for a window into his thinking about it (depending on how he does this sort of think, anywhere from thinking aloud during the process to discussing it after working alone is fine).

Getting your foot in the door only works if you can then perform, and while mr_b has learned a number of fantastically valuable things, he hasn't learned a number of critical software things. Some people can pull it off if their manager(s) aren't too attentive and/or bright and they're working alone, but he'd be far better off with people who are good and who would mentor him in his first few jobs.

Plus he'd get much better recommendations for his next job if they're from people with clues.
A mass experiment in altering political memories
So what was his reasoning for leaving it off the device? To be less "Microsoft" and because they want to compete? Right...
Just let users start with 2 karma.
What a strange article. Only a geek could even think such a thing. "Taking the awkwardness out"? To find out your impending spouse had signed a contract that bound them to create an ironclad prenup with you, would mark you as the most suspicious, manipulative bastard on earth. That relieves the awkwardness of finding out later I suppose.
Couple of things.

1. Readability - I find light fontcolor on light background color difficult to read.

2. I was trying to look for pricing information. Even after 3 clicks or so, I was not able to find it. (It may be there on the website, just saying that It is not readily accessible.. or I might have missed to notice it :)).
How we use Silverback for user testing
Web Design – Use of Photoshop in Web Design
A Web Design company may use Photoshop for many reasons. The use of graphic design tools such as Photoshop can reduce the time required to develop a website and also leads to better quality of design. Photoshop is one of the leading graphic design software available in the market and popular with Website design companies, freelance web designers and other graphic design professionals.
Eyeballs or customers, If I may ask?