skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"This makes me want to read that other guy's blog! Sounds like an approach to software methodology that would come out of LessWrong."

IIRC Isaac (the guy who is replying to the Agile enthusiast on the thread) did a superb job of demolishing the agile "evidence" presented by Craig Larman and the article was first put up on Ron Jeffries's site for "fairness" but was later pulled (I guess because it was causing serious credibility issues for the methodology vendor folks).

As he says,

"Ron Jeffries challenged me to write specifically about Craig Larman's "evidence", and for a while what I wrote and Craig Larman's response was shown on www.xprogramming.com - but now it seems to be the only article going back through 1998 that isn't available from the website archives ;-)

Doing that research taught me that I don't enjoy debunking - proximity to snake oil leaves a bad taste."

"The Principle of Dispassionate Methodology: Don’t get your method advice from a method enthusiast. The best advice comes from people who care more of Wisdom.
ASCII can be stored in a byte, so at most he is going to use

256*(index+length).

Assuming he doesn't have more than 2^64 byte of data, he will only need 24576 bytes to the index, and only 32768 if he needs a 64 bit, rather than a 32 bit length.

You might even not need the length argument as it is only the next array index subtracted from the current. In that case you need only 16384 bytes.

If you want two bit unicode, you have to use 49152, 65536 and 32768 bytes, respectively.

Remember he only wanted to index the first value.
What about Interact online? I've used it on a bunch of Canadian sites and it allows me to pay directly from my online bank account.
No he doesn't. From the article:

Stock buybacks are very popular with some investors as a way for a company to transfer value from the company back to the shareholders. It is like a dividend, except it is taxed as a capital gain, not ordinary income.

He's approaching it from the opposite direction; ie returning value to investors who are selling their stock. But if the company is truly worth more per share, in terms of tangible book value, than the price the shares are trading at then anyone who is selling up is getting a bad deal. These people aren't getting value. It's the people who retain their stock who are getting value because they're managing to buy slices of a company worth $(X+Y) for only $X.

A simplified example:

FictionCorp has $200 million in the bank and 100 million shares outstanding. For some reason, the shares are trading at $1, despite the $2/share sitting in the bank.

If FictionCorp manages to go and buy back half its stock at $1/share, it now has $150 million in the bank but only 50 million outstanding shares. Each share now represents $3 worth of cash in FictionCorp's bank account.

Hence, the remaining stockholders are better off because they've managed to buy a larger portion of FictionCorp at a discount to its actual value.
How may companies have more cash than market cap?

It doesn't seem that implausible after a stock market crash.
The mystery of sex transmutation (sex drive --&gt; creativity)
1 Samuel
Chapter 5
1
The Philistines, having captured the ark of God, transferred it from Ebenezer to Ashdod.
2
They then took the ark of God and brought it into the temple of Dagon, placing it beside Dagon.
3
When the people of Ashdod rose early the next morning, Dagon was lying prone on the ground before the ark of the LORD. So they picked Dagon up and replaced him.
4
But the next morning early, when they arose, Dagon lay prone on the ground before the ark of the LORD, his head and hands broken off and lying on the threshold, his trunk alone intact.
5
For this reason, neither the priests of Dagon nor any others who enter the temple of Dagon tread on the threshold of Dagon in Ashdod to this very day; they always step over it.
6
1 Now the LORD dealt severely with the people of Ashdod. He ravaged and afflicted the city and its vicinity with hemorrhoids; he brought upon the city a great and deadly plague of mice that swarmed in their ships and overran their fields.
7
On seeing how matters stood, the men of Ashdod decided, "The ark of the God of Israel must not remain with us, for he is handling us and our god Dagon severely."
8
So they summoned all the Philistine lords and inquired of them, "What shall we do with the ark of the God of Israel?" The men of Gath replied, "Let them move the ark of the God of Israel on to us."
9
So they moved the ark of the God of Israel to Gath! But after it had been brought there, the LORD threw the city into utter turmoil: he afflicted its inhabitants, young and old, and hemorrhoids broke out on them.
10
The ark of God was next sent to Ekron; but as it entered that city, the people there cried out, "Why have they brought the ark of the God of Israel here to kill us and our kindred?"
11
Then they, too, sent a summons to all the Philistine lords and pleaded: "Send away the ark of the God of Israel. Let it return to its own place, that it may not kill us and our kindred." A deadly panic had seized the whole city, since the hand of God had been very heavy upon it.
12
Those who escaped death were afflicted with hemorrhoids, and the outcry from the city went up to the heavens.

God says...
Jerusalem had turmoiling necessaries pernicious dispose
companion storm refrained Their softened While inclination
assented plant details shower precede conscience smelling
pay cleaving enquiring principally recalled reproachful
grammar Alexandria processing Now owed anticipated bird
moderate halved stream treasures lingering school Manichaean
MEDIUM hope townsman Paraclete Manichees till search blessing
unworthy returned contain ebbing Athenians
Finally The Farce That Is Fin Reg Reform Passes ...
sex.xxx

the most expensive domain evar
Interpolation searches are a bit tricky in practice. As the author notes, if the keys are uniformly distributed, it can work well. But if you're given a set of values that aren't uniformly distributed, it can be much slower than a binary search.
sophos anti-virus wasn't able to detect compromised binaries or source until nearly 2 years after compromise, just like the rest of us. sounds like software i don't need.

(and that's assuming you get their on-demand scanning working (talpa) which only seems to work with out of date kernels.)
I don't really see how Scribd will be able to maintain any appeal if Chrome polishes up their in-browser PDF rendering, which basically loads instantaneously and seems to render things fine. (The HTML transmogrification is cool, but if PDFs are fast, why do I need it?)
I assumed that's what he meant, but I think that's more an issue of not being able to afford to go to college.
I don't understand point 4. Why restore the redundant HTTP cookie?
Ask HN: What programming language do I use?
I am starting back into programming after two years of hiatus. Previous experience(basic) in C includes pointers, file handling.

To start off again, what language do I code in?
C, C++, python, Java, others?
No, I'm not. It's two different things.

1) Lists of blocked sites are harder to implement and make people swallow.

but

2) they aren't mutually exclusive with blocking whole domains.
So that you can track the user for as long as possible. Very useful if you are running an ad network.
I had the same fear as you, but lets be real - if they wanted to outlaw porn, they don't have to put in on a special domain first, they could just outlaw it.

On the other hand, this allows schools and companies to much easier block porn. It also gives parents a real choice in what to allow their kids to access (personally I don't mind my future kids look at porn, but I would like the opertunity to block it anyway as it would be a good motivation for them to learn some computer skills).
Personally, I wish they would spend that money on making their email client display html well. It sucks for emailing tabular data to business owners.

They could also greatly improve their web browser. Apple's devices totally eat RIM's lunch when it comes to browsing.
Chrome took the pin tab from opera.. (like everything else)

However the dev of chrome (not sure if its in stable yet) allows you to have these custom apps already. When you install them they also give the app extra permissions such as display tray notices and geo location. This way the app does not have to ask for them every time.
We’re suing everybody on Twitter
But maybe those guys were paid..
One of the things I've thought would be interesting to try, would be if you could reduce class and id names to 1 or 2 character strings a la javascript minifiers. You'd have to do globally across all html files, and linked css and js files, so it would be a bit challenging.
Hmmmm.... GPU's in the cloud anyone?
Droppin 0day on 0day droppers
Product Managers In the Modern Dev Team
Umm, please let me restate jameskilton's position below (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1460474):

Use semicolons or your shit wont work in IE... That's why semicolons in javascript AREN'T optional.
I'm in a pretty similar situation, and I've decided to go to Berlin. It's cheap, international, english is widely spoken, good public transport, internet shouldn't be a problem and there's a start-up community there.
"There is evidence, he says, that digital technology is already damaging the long-term memory consolidation that is the basis for true intelligence ... this is a radical upending of the 'literate mind' that has been the hallmark of civilisation for more than 1,000 years."

I don't know if the author addresses this in his book, but it is widely observed that pre-literate societies have much greater focus and training on memorization and long-term memory as a group than their literate counterparts. It is likely that technology does change they way we decide to remember things (compare the amount of phone numbers you had memorized in your pre-cellphone years to how many you memorize now) but I think as a species we are far too concerned with trivia and details to really not be able to make connections. I think there will always be people with an energy and enthusiasm for learning and that isn't going to be destroyed by using google more often.

Or maybe the author is correct and the internet is just paving the way for us evolving into Eloi. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eloi
Complete waste of time and a boondoggle.
If my phone can work through about a foot of flesh, then an iPhone should easily be working through an inch of flesh.

If the claims of it being solved with a bumper or layer of insulating material are accurate, then it does work through an inch of flesh, what it doesn't do is work when the flesh is electrically connecting two separate parts of the antenna system.
I wish the ICANN would knock it off. TLD's are not an effective way to group websites. They are making the namespace more complex for little or no benefit. Now that the horses are effectively out of the barn, they should just make the TLD registry replace the concept of a domain. Cannon already bought .cannon right?
I'd like to see an example of IE breaking without semi-colons. I've never seen that happen before. (I have seen the issue w/ commas though)
What if, for example, I include by mistake confidential information that I am forced by law not to disclose, or media I don't have the proper copyright for?

For example, I make a statistical financial simulator for Android and by mistake the build includes my test data which is from some big bank ? Being able to pull the plug on that build would be really nice -- because I'm pretty sure nobody at Google would care to help you with that.

Or, I might do an audio player and I'm including some music whose copyright expired in the rest of the world, but not in US.

Indeed it might do more harm than good that normal developers have the right to do this, but if you assume developers are responsible about it, it might be a good thing. For example, Google could supervise this or charge a flat fee, etc.
Online delivery of Flowers, Cakes and Gifts 
We do same day delivery of cakes, Gifts and flowers to all major cities in India.
Ticketmaster Rival Ticketfly Acquires Music Event Service Gigbot
I think that the agilist response to the issue is that there isn't any way to measure agile's effectiveness. See Martin Fowler's article on the subject: http://www.martinfowler.com/bliki/CannotMeasureProductivity....

Like it or not, programmer productivity is difficult if not impossible to measure. I'm all for reasoned debate on the subject, but methodologies are very subjective. Expecting proof out of an agilist is a bit like asking a liberal to prove that liberalism is correct: you're never going to get it because it can't be provided.
Tabs on top is as retarded as moving the stop button to the right of the address bar: just travel more distance to do common tasks.

Bad UI design.

At least we will have the option to change it back, with the stop button we are fucked. And every day of my life I damn the "genius" who moved the stop button.
if they wanted to outlaw porn, they don't have to put in on a special domain first, they could just outlaw it

Yes, but having it moved to a TLD that can more easily be filtered makes that transition that much easier. I think the real push will be to legislate that all adult content be moved to the XXX domain... at least in the US.
TryParse vs Convert
In other news, domain registrars issued updated guidance on improved earnings...
Yes, the attitude of "I don't have to know what I'm talking about in order to hold an extreme view and be 100% confident in it" is not only wrong, it underlies most of the avoidable catastrophes in human history.
It happens from time to time, mostly after market bubbles burst these days.

It used[1] to happen a bit more often because information wasn't as readily available.

[1] ie decades ago...
The generic name for this is a prepaid credit card. They seem to exist around the world, but I've never seen them being sold in any shops where I live.
I am a developer who works on teams that use agile processes. I happen to believe they work better, based on my subjective experiences with other approaches, but I don't really have the kind of numbers one really needs to back up each individual practice, which is something I struggle with.

I don't struggle much, though. The most important aspect of my definition of agile is that it speeds up the feedback loop, which allows the person signing the checks to gather whatever kinds of metrics they need to on a week to week basis. Essentially, weekly iterations make quantitative analysis of the software development process possible. Every other practice teams do or don't adopt falls out from this newfound ability to gather and disseminate metrics which are, in principle, of much higher quality. Do write tests, or don't [ed. note: do]; but either way, track weekly, and let that guide your process.
That's not Apple's strategy though. They'd rather be a luxury product with higher profit margins than sell tons and tons of devices. These queues enhance the image of being "out of reach" for some people, and increase the exclusive appeal.

I don't like their strategy, but it clearly is working.
Dublin, Ireland

Paddy Power is hiring 2 Ruby on Rails developers: http://workwithpaddy.com/search.php - enter keyword "Ruby"
Not too pleased with this bit of reporting at the end:

"Yesterday's ROV incident is not BP's first. In April, the robots failed to activate the blow out preventer device...."

The robot manually (so to speak :-) flipped a switch on a control panel (http://www.flickr.com/photos/uscgd8/4551846015/). The BOP failed to do its thing (as it had when its deadman switch feature failed). Not the fault of the poor robot at all.
HP linux netbook
It's a lot of stuff, measured in man years of effort over
the lifetime of a software project as big as Firefox.
And they can eliminate it all with a simple executive
decision.

They can eliminate 100% of their codebase, 100% of their bugs, and 100% of their support issues with a "simple executive decision" as well. So what? If you're going to build and distribute any kind of tool, you have to strike the right balance between the issues of flexibility, performance, ease of use, etc. But saying "strip out choices as a wholesale maneuver" is not even striving for balance.

The only positive thing I can say about this mindset is that, since so much software is open source these days, at least forks can be created when products err too far on one side or the other of one of these lines. But is all that duplicated effort really benefiting the community?
That doesn't work in any javascript interpreter. Semi-colons aren't optional inside the parenthesis of a for statement, according to the spec.

http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/files/ECMA-ST...

Section 7.9.2 (page 37)
no design ought to sacrifice usability, no matter how beautiful

That way leads to the Homer Simpson car. Every design makes trades away from an ideal of usability for aesthetic reasons as well as cost and practicality.
It's too late for Myspace
a growing disconnect between internet people and reality

The disconnect has always been there. People have always had immersion bias. That's why it goes by many names: Parochialism, regionalism, racism, class bias, tribalism.

It's fun to watch people blame the disconnect between tribal culture and reality on the Internet -- one could have predicted that; new technology tends to get blamed for anything and everything, no matter what the technology is -- but history is replete with examples of clueless, reality-disconnected people who managed to construct their bubbles without the benefit of any kind of networking tech. Lysenko didn't need the net. The pre-Revolutionary French aristocracy didn't need the net.
I know he suggested a company rename and now using your device in a way that doesn't stop it working - when else?
Paddy Power over in Dublin is hiring a couple of Ruby on Rails developers to work on social games in a separate team, startup environment that has the perks that come from operating under the umbrella of a large company.

http://workwithpaddy.com/search.php - enter keyword "Ruby"
What's your ideal Apple response?
Apple people are Bastiat fans. Who knew? :)

http://goo.gl/5jEe
Image caption:

> Fried brains is a delicacy in France

WTF?
GOTO considered helpful
Amazon EC2 freezes Moore's law
The power of an Amazon EC2 small instance has remained the same for years http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types

With EC2 there is no steady increase each year in computing power. It's like Moore's law has been frozen in time. EC2 server instances are looking decidedly old and underpowered.

Amazon gets all the benefit of hardware costs decreasing and computing power increasing over time, but no increase in power gets passed through to EC2 users.

Very sad. Slow old cloud computing servers are starting to make running your own powerful modern, cheap, fast servers look attractive.

Will cloud computing vendors start to seriously compete on computing power?
It's highly unlikely that FictionCorp will manage to buy half it's stock without moving the markets. Most shareholders who sell will get significantly more than $1/share.
I think the point is that if you're a startuppish company, you should still have "places to go" with your money in the bank rather than being "out of ideas", like RIM apparently is, as he mentions at the end.
Excuse my ignorance: what do you mean by noisy?
Mongol warriors declare war on Panzer division. News at 11:00.
"Why bother write a malware that has got ... an order of magnitude less chances to spread?"

That's plain wrong.
Read Rick Moen takes on the subject here: http://linuxmafia.com/~rick/faq/index.php?page=virus#virus4
If anyone is still reading this thread, I made a chart overnight using a better corpus:

http://partiallystapled.com/~gxti/misc/2010/06/25-shootout.p...

http://partiallystapled.com/~gxti/misc/2010/06/25-linux-2.6....
Furthermost SSH ever?
The Eloi are the more unthinking group.
Without solid evidence, this tired old claim holds about as much weight as when my parents told me that spending too much time infront of the TV or computer screen would make my eyes turn square.
Silicon Valley Superlatives (Most Impressive Valley-Folks)
Oblong is Hiring
It loads just fine for me.
The White Knight from Through the Looking Glass would be jealous.
Ad Retargeting – An Advertisment’s Evil Brother
Entrepreneurs Have to Make Decisions, Quickly
it is actually more reliable to sleep than to block. by definition blocking is unreliable because you don't know exactly when it will unblock. You do know when a sleep will end though. I also want a variable delay between writes.
Depends on what you're doing. Right tool for the job and all that.

C, C++, Java and PHP are popular (according to the Tiobe index). The last 3 can teach you some OOP if you're not already familiar with it.

If you're interested in functional programming, you can learn some stuff from Lisp, F#, OCaml, Haskell
Any references on that? It sounds possible, but I thought I had heard of cases of stock buybacks not increasing the share price.

I guess obviously if a company does a buyback but the stock goes down for unrelated reasons then you're really not gaining anything.
It's a simplified example. Of course it will move the markets, and buying back half the outstanding stock is highly unlikely in any case. I just used those figures to make the math simple.
It didn't help that most customized profiles ate more CPU than running Quake. MySpace users discovered the worst CSS practices, or was it the "get MySpace codes" sites?
The $0.001 DIY iPhone 4 Antenna Fix
I can imagine this being incredibly effective, Facebook have discovered an effective method for human powered search that covers the whole internet (EDIT: was referring to the like button here).

Not only that, search results could be tailored to your age category, interests, what other people like you "liked". Put simply, this is genius.

EDIT: why am I being downvoted so much? Just my opinion.
Evidence would be hard to obtain.

I find it highly improbable that any software development methodology can provide deterministic, repeatable results.

The metric to measure isn't productivity, rather one should be looking at happiness. If it works for your team and they feel like they get a lot done by using an agile approach then you're using the right methodology. Agile isn't for everyone though and that's not a failing of the methodology.
I think myspace is still a viable place for a musician to set up an online presence.
The sole purpose of the company is ... to increase shareholder value

The root of all evil, right there.

I prefer companies whose sole purpose is to act as an engine of change for a better world. Even Drucker's (?) "sole purpose of a company is to get and retain customers" is better.

My real problem with your quote (from Friedman is it?) is that when a majority, or even a vocal and persuasive minority, or people adopt that attitude it throws out a lot of the social constraints in place to keep people running the companies from doing things that harm us as a society. That is, "he was just acting in his own best interest" can be used to justify many acts that are selfish and short-sighted, because there are no social consequences of this. Even people of high personal moral standards are willing to give a pass to evil deeds because "he did what he had to do."

I disagree.