skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Great comment. 2 thoughts:

1. You can read anything and it (often) sounds convincing. Quality writing that is incorrect often trumps poor writing that is correct. That's way we must always be vigilant readers, especially on the internet.

2. "ArchitectingForTheFuture" does not necessarily mean "MoreLinesOfCode". I'd like to read more articles of Type 3: How excellent design and proper use of tools gives you the best of both Type 1 and Type2.

[EDIT 1: stcredzero, in reference to cousin comment, my personal metric is n=2. I never want the same line of code more than once. I'm sure there are good arguments for other values of n, but this has always seemed to work well for me.]

[EDIT 2: I try to make a point to never say "Not Hacker News" or complain about content. Conversely I should be quick to claim "Not Not Hacker News". This is a great thread! About stuff near and dear to this programmer's heart. Keep 'em coming.]
From a hiring standpoint, the industry is very inbred. Most new hires (except maybe in QA) in my company come from other companies. Our industry can bet that there are a fair deal of experienced (if only slightly) people out there who were either fired after a project ended, quit because of burnout, or are otherwise available on the market, so it's not very common to look beyond this pool.

Academic preparation will usually get you nowhere, and for a programming job it will only help in a secondary way, or for a more "generic programming" job like tools programming. We generally only pay attention if you've done "cool stuff", usually written games in your own time or as class projects, or have experience at other gaming companies. Gaming degrees or gaming schools (DigiPen, Full Sail) will help, but only insofar as it provides you with an environment where you can easily make "cool stuff". We don't care about your gaming degree; we care about what you accomplished in class.

Now, one thing to point out is that there's not as much of an iron curtain in European companies. Based on anecdotal chats with some programmers from these companies, it seems much more common that they formerly worked in a "boring" industry.
Did you check Computer Advantage across from the airport. I got mine in Sarasota from Computer Advantage about a week ago. It was the 32GB wifi only model.
Take internships. Even if they're unpaid. This may not be popular advice, and you do need to watch out for internships that are truly exploitative, but many small startups simply have limited resources, and are looking for people who want to make the experience instead of pay tradeoff.

Ability to learn and solve problems will be more important for these positions than previous experience.

Also, nthing the advice of work on your own projects. If you can't think of an original problem you'd like to solve, choose a web app you really like and try to recreate your own version of it. The main thing is to have a complete goal, like "Learn how to build a site with Rails that shows me graphs of a user's twitter network's activity", not "Learn Rails".
At Plurk.com we use node.js to provide comet updates to over 300.000 active clients at _once_. It's not a toy and it scales much better than most of other web-stacks I have tried. Read more here: http://amix.dk/blog/post/19490#Plurk-Instant-conversations-u...
New Zealand Politicians Convinced By Lobbyists To Bring Back Software Patents
Hi. I am a freelance web designer. I am starting a distributed web design firm. Basically its a couple of freelancers, who are collaborating together so everyone can benefit from everyone else's skills and local reach.

If you are interested then email me at alexwyser@gmail.com
They're just two sides of the same coin. YAGNI is the starting point. Be as minimal as possible. Code is just like inventory in a supply chain. Do things as cheaply as possible for as long as you can get away with it.

I think you're misinterpreting Type 2. You don't bring out Type 2 to prevent future problems. You bring it out to solve problems.

I have a rule: don't apply a pattern or other advanced technique until doing so will eliminate or reduce code in more than 3 places. If the same code starts popping up in more than 3 places, it may show up in a whole lot more, and it's going to start being a pain to find all of the occurrences. On the other hand, just finding 2 or 3 and correcting them is not really that hard, so leaving things until n=4 is not too bad.

Going back to the article, never apply a pattern in a language until doing so yields fewer lines of code than the original code. If your language requires N > 10 for this to be true for most patterns, then switch languages! (Someone should turn this into a metric!)
Ah, those button captions :) I do not have any data, but I do know that I am an "OK"-button hunter. If I see one, I'm likely to click on it without thinking.

I think I got this idea from the SVN blog at 37signals, but I'm not sure.
Might not be 100% relevant but there's a Node Redis client and Redis can now do publish and subscribe, check out the examples here:

http://github.com/fictorial/redis-node-client/tree/master/ex...
Optimizing Kidney Allocation
Why not add a small amount of radioactive material and measure decays?
The HTML5 Roadmap, Past and Present
Purchased by Larry Ellison? That's a terrifying thought.
As I say in a cousin comment: an easy way to get the best of both worlds is to wait until you have an apparent problem. The 4th time you start writing that same switch statement, maybe you can tell you're going to be doing this a lot more and it's time to bring out Strategy. Doing it sooner is too likely to be premature.

The advantage of this approach: you never have to prognosticate. Hindsight is 20/20, so use it!

EDIT: I used to use n=2 as my threshold, but I found it much better to have a slightly higher n in Smalltalk. I am spoiled, though because I have such lightweight but powerful (syntax-aware) tools for searching such patterns.
comet updates are a niche application
The redirect loop in Google Groups happen to me too ... yesterday I could only read the groups I'm subscribed to by being logged-out (as it happens only when I'm logged-in).
The problem is I don't consider "Le Monde" as a quality newspaper anymore: why would I buy it? What's its added value compared to information I cat get for free? It has a very serious tone but is in fact a very consensual newspaper (and usually gets really conservative as soon as elections approach; just look who is controlling it…). More concerning, it brings very few relevant in-depth analysis with historical context and involvement and doesn't differenciate itself enough from all the rest. I subscribe only to "Le Monde Diplomatique" which is the only newspaper which still brings some insights and reports going beyond just annotated events which that I can find anywhere.
I wish you could give Wolfram a break and look at him with liberated eyes. I don't think there's anything exceptionally egocentric about this article unless you look for it - in fact I find it quite disturbing that you would want to make this celebration of Turing into a piece about Wolfram's ego. Sure Wolfram's glasses are no doubt tinted by his own ideas, but what entrepreneur's isn't? If any, people at HN should be aware of this and I find it sad the lack of sympathy for a man who, when it comes down to it, has actually done good things and contributed to this world.
I would guess that 95% of extensible systems are never extended :-)
The Most Creative Lamp Designs Ever « Lighting Universe
I would imagine HP / Palm will just do a cross-licensing and be done with it. HTC has a much more problematic position then HP/Palm, Nokia, Apple, Microsoft, and RIM. The suits between the big players are more extended negotiations.
Bullied Into Releasing Source Code
VERY very good point. Do you keep it invite only then? I'd certainly buy in. Then again, why not just make it an invite only fund where the buy in is a monthly commitment of $500-$1000. 100 entrepreneurs at 1k a month, is 1.2 million. Invest that at 25k across 40 deals (leaving 200k left over as a reserve for legal,etc. though it may not be that high using standard docs).
Excel File for Sharing Expenses Among Founders
Real estate probably should be considered finance, making money in real estate is all about having access to the proper financing.
DC Comics Launches Digital Publishing
It would help me a lot if you defined what you mean by 'holistic' since you use it frequently in your article. I'm not familiar with this term used in other contexts besides medicine. http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/holistic isn't very helpful and the term remains rather opaque.
just about any other industry there would be a lot more innovation in play

Oh, let's not be unfair, the newspapers aren't noticeably worse than primary education, secondary education, the automobile industry, legacy airlines, or the government at innovating.
By the clients, sure. But by the original authors?

This design (it's the basic "convert a switch statement to polymorphism" refactoring) turns a ball of mud switch statement into several independently comprehensible classes. Operations can be understood, verified and tested apart from the whole evaluation apparatus.

No doubt many programmers today massively (perhaps even criminally) overengineer their software, but the fact remains, the example chosen by the author is a really bad one.
1. Glamour: "I want to be recognized"

2. Love for gaming: "I love gaming, why would I leave?"

3. Love for sports: "I love sports, I enjoy it."

4. Guilt: "I feel like I'm cheating the company"

What a great list of selfish bull-crap. The woman in the article ended with how much it effects not just the person - but your family and the people who care about you. Sure, you have a handful of reasons to stay, but what about your kids who have grown up for the last 4 years without you? What about your wife that hasn't had a romantic, stressless dinner and a night out in 5 months? What about your parents, who never get to even talk to you on the phone anymore?

Staying for any other reason in an environment like that, whatever your interests are, is piggish, self-centered, and short sighted.

What makes you think your family would stick around for that? They don't get the glamor, they probably don't love gaming as much, sports is a hit or miss, and you'd have another thing coming if you really believed the "guilt" option.
OK, you're right, hoax is the wrong word. Sorry about that.

What irked me is this kind of hyped up story of "little guy in a workshop makes amazingly complex device and look, he's going to beat all these scientists supported by billions of $". It is way too common and, frankly, bad reporting. Neil Calder, quoted in the article, summed it up nicely: we look forward to your ideas, but good luck.

Not once did the BBC mention Farnsworth. It would have been a much better article if they explained a bit what the science was.

Also, go to Fusor.net and read a bit. For example, question 1 on the right hand side column near the top under "welcome newbies" has scientific gems such as "It is God's own way of powering the universe" and uses the word "impossible" (in quotes) often. It's the typical bad science writing that is too common these days, and IMHO the BBC shouldn't be supporting it.

So, not a hoax, but written up like one.
Point taken. See my reply to randallsquared in this thread.
I also noticed something weird with Google lately. Even when I'm signed into my google account, if I go to youtube, it asks me to sign in. When I click the sign in link and use my google/youtube account, it redirects me to the "Do you already have a YouTube Account?" page where I can log in ,which doesn't work, or create a new account. WTF?
I remember the "Stunts!" game which let you customize your tracks... it was huge fun when I was a child.

Here it is on Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stunts_%28video_game%29
That's particularly awesome, the semantic web by crawling :)
And that's reasonable in the case of trespass. In this scenario, Facebook should just close your account if they don't want you to log in.
I think someone did a find-and-replace for the word "Naturally".
Deal: EA Drops 17 Games Titles to $0.99 for the iPhone
Hmm thought that expression was well known also outside medicine?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holism
Well, it's nothing new, really.

Patent shenanigans has been happening since before James Watt got into patent wars with various steam engine inventors.

You see, all those who think patent problems are a recent phenomena of our time are clearly mistaken. It's a disaster that stretches centuries.

Nobody wants to think about abolishing it of course. It's unthinkable and so obviously wrong. We should reform it. We should fix it! We should do anything but abolish it!

But you know what? If those crazy libertarians believe in those clearly outrageous ideas, maybe they do have some merits. It would seem to be so opposite to the idea of property right and ownership, but yet those crazy ideologue believe IP to be incompatible with property rights.

I mean, we even got Eric Raymond being afraid of IP abolitionists being right.

But clearly, I will be dismissed as someone with no entrepreneurial experience or just some kid who only want free musics. A nut-case who only considers short-term interest.

I guess I'll have to crush you all in the business arena and show you how wrong you clearly are.
And you would absolutely be correct, after clarification. Only difference is that when Latin was supreme, literacy was scarce and only available to the wealthy. Today, schooling is the only thing available to the poor. The average Arab is underemployed and over educated. While among the wealthy, Western languages and just complete illiteracy is popular (see any "heir" give a speech and you will see a man at war with grammar.)
Really, it depends on your environment. In Smalltalk, most things are objects. Not surprisingly, it turns out to be easiest to make most things objects. I find that Smalltalk is best when a program is mostly objects, there's a sprinkling of short-ish procedural methods whose workings are hidden by encapsulation, and perhaps a handful of long optimized algorithmic methods.

I suspect that in Self, it's easier to make more things objects. (jk - everything is an object in Self.) Objects aren't quite as easy to use in C++ and Java. The cost is higher, so the opportunities to use objects with a good cost/benefit payoff are fewer. That's all there is to it.

Does this generalize? In most Functional languages, functions are really easy to use, and can be used in flexible and powerful ways. What's the best way to program in them? Why, using functions! Yup, seems to work. Fancy that!
Great, had been meaning to take a look at ZeroMQ and this was a good 20min read/synopsis. Thanks.
My conclusion, as I watch my own code wander back and forth in the space between the two poles, is: One needs a lot of practice!
Team Fortress 2 was released and enjoyed by millions. The updates which they release fixed leaks in maps, and patch the engine to handle new technology and be more optimal with developing hardware. Remember, the source engine is almost a decade old, and they keep making it better and better. (Granted I think its now called the Orange Box engine to refer to the newer engine.)
And the number of updates have no added new features, weapons, items, and maps to the game, free of charge. None of that paying for DLC bullshit.
I believe that the TF2 dev team consists of the original TF developers from back in the quake days, and they have plenty of experience and knowledge in what the people want. Whats more is they have as much fun making the game and its updates as players do.

Jeez... if I thought like you, I'd think that Operating systems are garbage because of the multiple updates and versions over time to interface with new hardware, technologies, and add new features.
Interesting On The Media piece about the history and state of France's subsidies: http://www.onthemedia.org/transcripts/2009/01/30/05

Most recently Sarkozy bought everyone turning 18 a newspaper subscription.
It also depends on the language. I bought a book about functional programming in Java once. I found it painful.
Anyone interested in this topic ought to take a look at Ron Eglash's TED talk on African Fractals:

http://blog.ted.com/2007/11/ron_eglash.php
I wonder if it is a battle of article format rather than platform. I know a couple of people on the tech side of some newspapers and they say that there is a push for shorter, punchier articles from some of the web editors since they believe that people won't read long articles on a screen. On the other hand the print editors want longer more in-depth and detailed articles since they feel that is an area where print can beat on-line.

So if the core newsroom prefers to produce longer and more detailed articles, then I can understand them being reluctant to support the digital strategy. Not because they are against digital per se, but because they are against the form that news tends to take on the web.
Turn it off. Largely due to crappy news and marketing. We went off cable 2 yrs ago. Public library dvds, netflix and amazon streaming, and the internet in general replaces it all.

Occasionally surprises that need explanation. YouTubing for wild turkeys. We came across a video which showed a male humping a decoy and having his head blown off a few seconds later. More about sex and death than I wanted to discuss with my 5 yr old but we got through it intact.
;)
Such as?

In addition to disliking videos for various reasons, today I'm on a crappy internet connection. 5 minutes is actually getting towards a watchable length, but not on this connection:-/
I guess that would make me ignorant in that respect. The first paragraph of the wiki article clears it up for me. Thanks.
And here I was thinking the article would be about a fission reactor! Much tougher DIY project. Heavy water or graphite pile would be your best bet. That way you can use natural uranium from your back yard. The article mentions uranium as if it's hard to get. You can still fission U-238. It's just tougher.
clearly points out several advantages, so i think it qualifies as comparison.

* commonjs conformant
* mature & stable
* java access
* ...

i agree: dislike of nodejs shines through, but that was clear after the first paragraph. hard to talk about ssjs without mentioning node, nowadays.
I think a better way to put it is:

1 - only solve problems that already exist
2 - only accept solutions less painful than the problem

Really, if programmers could stick to this, this would be all the methodology we'd need!
I had the Google Groups infinite redirect happening last week. Cleared my session and cookies, and that seemed to fix it.
Are you sure you didn't see the forest for the trees? As far as I know, there is not a huge industry demand out there for Hello World applications, but there is a demand for simple examples when explaining concepts.
Good post. Another way to put it?

"Hitched to Someone Else's Dream"
http://www.inc.com/magazine/20080901/hitched-to-someone-else...

"I got sucked into his enterprise -- our livelihood now depended on it -- and though I had little input into its direction, I stood to lose everything if it failed."

Article echoes much of what my wife has dealt with in 15 years I've been building companies.
In grad school, a friend told me he wanted to go into videogame programming, so I described this post to him. His response was immediate and unwavering: "I don't care, I want to do game programming so much that I'll do whatever it takes."

I suspect that enough people like this graduate every year that EA can maintain their high employee turnover indefinitely.
CE companies business is not to sue others that might use their patents by default. Most companies still try to sell products. Companies build up patent portfolios as a defensive weapon mostly.

The best position to sue for patents is when you actually dont't sell products, that way nobody can sue you back for anything.

Patent fights between CE manufacturers will most likely get very ugly and apart from the bad publicity I fail to see what Apple has to gain here...
The Ideology of Pakistan. « Ramanan50's Blog
This sounds like something Marak would say.
SMobile Security Analysis of Over 48,000 Android Market Applications
If it's just one fund, there's one guy who decides what to buy. It's not a market. If you have $50K, you can contact any number of real VCs and give them your cash. You thus become a member of the prestigious LP club and are allowed to complain about the dismal returns.

I think the fun part is being able to individually look at the startups listed and buy whenever you see something you like. It makes you feel good (you are helping a good idea take off), and you may make a lot of money from it (or lose it all).

I was at TechCrunch50 last year and discussed this idea with some people, and I got pushback from pros. Their argument: if you are a good startup, you can raise money the "normal way". So such a market would only attract losers... Not good of a reputation to have for a stock market.
It's harder than you might think to model real physics with a cellular automaton.

Cellular automata are simulated on regular grids of cells, which gives them anisotropic (direction-dependent) behavior. For example, moving patterns in most automata can only travel in certain preferred directions (like gliders in Conway's game of life). And patterns that can move in multiple directions usually travel with different speeds in each direction.

In the real world, we don't observe any anisotropy in space, so none of the cellular automata I've seen proposed up to this point can model real physics, even in principle.

Lattice gas automata use hexagonal grids instead of square grids to alleviate this problem somewhat, but the anisotropy never really goes away, it's just reduced.
You could set the legal entity up somewhere like the UK, which doesn't have anything like SOX or (as far as I know) the concept of an "accredited investor".
Honestly, I think it is being unfair. This is not the usual story of some limber newcomers offering a better product for cheaper -- this is a monumental shift that upended an entire industry. This sort of thing doesn't happen very often.
> sorry to admit, but i'm from Ukraine

Why are you sorry?
I think frameworks have to be engineered carefully; the use of the strategy pattern in the example is a typical and is very soundly used in a framework. I think the problem is that developers write far too many frameworks than they should. Interestingly enough, it's code that isn't extensible that ends up being a framework -- mostly because the authors have time to focus on documentation, support, user interface and the like.
"They don't spring the hours on you, they increase them gradually."

More like the frog in the pot principal.
Perverse incentives
Damn that was good. Very similar to my own experiences.

I especially liked the point of not blowing money on ads and such. Getting ads right is hard, and most times you will waste your ad money. Feel free to dabble, but realize that your ROI will probably be dismal. Make sure to track your ROI somehow, or you won't even know how badly you're doing.
Apple closes the iTunes store for iPhone users who don't share location
It's tough to figure out exactly what that statement means, but it would not surprise me to hear journalists resisting writing SEO-friendly headlines and linkbait articles about the French equivalent of Ron Paul.
I like 'Bablefish'.
Update on San Francisco's proposed new business tax scheme [pdf]
lots of online media, but most of it isn't branded 'aol'
Well, some people like to say that there is nothing "intuitive" about User Interface whatsoever, even for Mac systems.

I don't know if it is true, but it does seem to have some air of truth around it.
I think it's an even bigger stretch than that because he's not even alluding to trademark infringement - he's referring to low-quality goods. Now, I think piracy is wrong, but comparing a bootleg movie to a fake life-saving device just makes you look ignorant.