skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Pixar success is all about the confluence of it's three major players.

1) Ed Catmull - He was the founder with the original vision and great technical skills. He also brings a humility to Pixar, hired only the smartest and best people, and knew that the art should drive the technology, not the other way around. I believe his biggest contribution was knowing he couldn't build Pixar by himself.

2) John Lasseter. Creative visionary. Pushed the tech people hard to think outside their comfort zones and find solutions to complicated problems. Without him, Pixar would be a dead software/hardware company.

3) Steve Jobs. Brought the cash. Let John and Ed do their thing. Managed the business relationships almost perfectly, negotiating the original deals w/ Disney, keeping Pixar insulated through some awful Eisner years, and, in my eyes, created the studio in the mold of a Silicon Valley company. He was also indispensable. He always gave just the right amount of push-back. Hopefully, Bob Iger can manage this as well as Steve did.
Javascript Super Mario Kart
Debian or Cetnos. Debian is great for servers that you want to perform one or two specific tasks on, because you can install only what you need. Centos is great because it follows RedHat Enterprise Linux very closely and thus pretty much any packaged software out there can be installed relatively easily on it.
I recommend watching "The Pixar Story" when it comes on STARZ. A great documentary.
I agree, with experience in this area (a lot of it): CentOS. Others are saying *BSD or Ubuntu or whatnot -- IMHO that's all because of politics or because of personal preference.

You want something that:

- is seasoned
- is widely used
- is aggressively updated
- is guaranteed to be supported for years
- is free

That's your CentOS. It's RHEL, of course. And CentOS has a foundation that gathers cash, so it's not just going to disappear one day.
Even if there were papers on it, I think there are too many confounding factors to elicit anything useful from them. Personally though, unit testing and test first development help me focus on a small problem and solving that, while ignoring the rest of the system. It's really easy to get pulled into the big picture. I also found my code to be more modular and decoupled.
Not unsurprisingly, articles like this say more about the author than about Knuth.

Knuth is not for everybody. No question about that. But for people who are interested in the area he covers, there is no one better.
I owned a T42 and now a T61p. Even tough the build quality hasn't improved speaking of it having gone downhill is drastically exaggerated. The quality is comparable between the two, the nice little ideas still exist (like the keyboard light etc.) the only real change I saw was that i had to loosen 4 screws to extend the memory instead of four :-)

But one person probably isn't truly a reference... So more references are needed.
I hope the OP was joking :-/
Amen, brother. You took the words right out of my mouth. Many, many startups fail for precisely this reason: they don't have a product people want.
I think the MacBook is worth considering. I like its form factor better than the MBP's.

If I was unable to use an external screen for extended sessions at home I might favor the larger screen.
Eliezer Yudkowsky to speak at the Stanford Transhumanist Association
Which Twitter Personality Type Are You?
Mandatory penny arcade link : http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2008/4/23/
Ask YC: Implementing an SMS application
I am implementing an application that has SMS features and i will like to know if there are any free SMS providers that i can link my application to their SMS Center. I have heard about Kannel (i.e. an open source sms center) but i am not too sure if i have to attach a GSM or GPRS modem to my server for it to work? N.B. I do not live in the USA. thanks
Nicely expressed.

It's odd (to me) how deeply American culture has ingrained in its subjects the notion that they are first and foremost consumers.

For me, the cognitive dissonance first surfaced when I thought about television: The TV networks are the producers, the advertisers are the consumers, and the viewers are the product. TV is not primarily a means of delivering entertainment to viewers-- it is a means of delivering viewers to advertisers.

It seems natural to think of ourselves as the end, but sometimes we're just the means....
Not sure I'm in any of these categories, more "using it because everyone else seems to be".
may I quote you?
> The number of results is not displayed correctly when < 7.

Doh! The library routine to perform estimates was working fine, the command line utility works fine, but there was a bad assumption between the web interface and the web service.

> larger searches always end at 1023 items

Many search engines limit to 200 results because some search algorithms become more computationally expensive when finding more data. It also costs more in bandwidth. However, special for you, I've raised the limit to a number much larger than the number of posts in this forum.

Your remaining report is due to an interaction with data sanitisation and Unicode.

> Hope this helps.

Most certainly. Thank you for your concise and constructive report.
Haha, I thought this was going to be about Hans Reiser.
I am not sure that the failure of commercial products, frameworks and books on unit-testing are a sign for the decline of the usage of unit-tests in general. In our company, we are extensively using unit-tests, but use no books neither commercial products (only the junit-framework). Maybe unit-tests have just become common programming practice without the need for any more hype?
But even when you can, you are not yet on the safe side...
Microsoft gives students a peek at the future
"Not unsurprisingly"? That hurts my head.
I learning that rhel or centos are the way to go.

I've had -remote- machines running debian, ubuntu, or fedora & all do not upgrade well at all remotely. Frankly, if your distro doesn't have a "foo upgrade" that works, run away!
Jaw-dropping Innovation?
Innovation Edge, London - not all it should have been but some useful moments for entrepreneurs...
That is actually a good argument for running the same OS on the desktop as well as servers. Experience gained while configuring a development envrionment can be used towards maintaining a production server.
Does it get them to agree to my rate? Sometimes.

Does it end all negotiations of my rate? Always.
Fess up, you found this while searching for a domain for a prospective file-hosting site you're working on, huh eru? :)
Krugman beat up Brooks and made him do his column. Brooks in turn apparently did the same thing to Safire.
Despite some overlap, there is a difference between computer science and programming. Knuth concentrates on the former, so you'll be disappointed with his books if you're only looking for the latter... The title "The Art of Computer Programming" is somewhat misleading in this regard.
The script fascinated me so much that I missed completely the fact that the page does have a body, which explains the mistery. Awesome.
Jython Reborn
Of course, anytime.
How do you handle disagreements?
Craigslist Tops U.S. Mobile Browsing
Yeah, one negative too many, huh? Well, I guess you can save the extra one for next time.
US Proposes "Pirate Bay Killer" Trade Agreement
I guess a short explanation is in order. foldr/foldl are folding or reduction operations. Heard of MapReduce? Well, fold is the reduction part (foldl specifically). It takes a list, function, and an accumulator and returns a list and the final accumulator value as a result. Pretty much every functional language has one and foldr/foldl names come from S/ML and later from Haskell.

You can see an example here: http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~en1000/haskell/hof.html
The difference between foldr and foldl is how the list is processed and in the final list (left to right or right to left) so depending on what your function is, order does matter. Also, foldr is not tail recursive so it can't be optimized nicely.

These sorts of constructs are coming back to forefront of computing since they offer us a very efficient way to do distributed computing. I use MR all the time these days to deal with large data sets.
When we fight over IT, nobody wins
Effing brilliant. I wish I had thought of this...
Unit Testing works great in Smalltalk. Refactoring Browser handily refactors your tests at the same time you're refactoring your code. I've heard complaints from people using other languages that Unit Tests make refactoring twice the work. There is no excuse for this. If your Unit Tests are just code, then the tools that change your code should just as easily change the tests that use the code.
Brazilian Beetles Hold Key to Faster Computers
I'll be there - I'm speaking about REST and Rails on Saturday
I said this very thing a few weeks ago.

CodingHorror is no longer a daily look for me. More like weekly or monthly.

If you look back, you'll see the quality of posts went down soon after Jeff began advertising on his blog. I think that the "pressure to publish" caused him to stop trying to publish important things, but to just publish liberally to get eyeballs.
TLDR

;)
Well said. I guess maybe Steve Jobs learned the lesson from Pixar and brought it back to Apple. Has anyone thought that Jonathan Ive is playing the role to Apple just like John Lasseter to Pixar recently?
Ask YC: Thoughts on my new video blog?
I just started up my new venture, talktech.tv, and was hoping to get some feedback. I've been interviewing founders and execs at silicon valley startups, and posting the videos to my site. What do you think of the interviews so far? Any suggestions for future posts?
Brilliant... and what a waste of such a nice domain name!
The Product Guy’s Weekend Reading (May 23, 2008)
In rigorous areas like math and CS, simple things often sound difficult because nobody tried hard enough to simplify the presentation. Some books hit the sweet spot, like Ken Binmore "Fun and Games" or Cormen, Leiserson, Rivest "Introduction to Algorithms". Knuth doesn't.
I looked into Agitar's JUnit Factory, but had to turn away from it when I realized that you send your source code to them to generate the tests. I have yet to work for a company that would feel comfortable doing that.
I thought K&R2 was pretty easy to read and understand, hardly, "painful and difficult".
As you can see from my posting history I've been here for about 5-6 months. Haven't had that link pasted to me yet. Oh well, there's a first time for everything :-)

It's very dangerous to parrot rules "because they're the rules". That's how totalitarian systems are built. I'm not saying this rule is, but many rules are nonsensical, destructive and limiting. I don't suggest you go on a crusade to question every rule, but at the same time, don't become a holy crusader for rules you don't even care about. The next thing you know, you might be telling some people to stick on a yellow star so that they don't hear it from the bad guys with guns who might beat them up. (woops, Godwin's law. Discussion ended).

Interesting that someone edited my post above and removed the "Daniel" forcibly.

Daniel
The author wants the knoweledge that can be immediately applied; in my opinion it's the common mistake: without understanding the basics (which is full of Math's) all what you'll have is the set of recipes for your everyday tasks, and won't be able to master really challenging problems.
The most serious problem with Knuth's TAOCP books is that they are severely out of date. For example, Volume III (searching and sorting) only has two paragraphs that even mention virtual memory and memory caches at all. That is a huge issue--if you have a sorting problem that is bad enough that you need to break out Knuth, then you probably need to know to implement the algorithms in a cache-oblivious manner. Further, you need to know when you can rely on the VMM (mmap and swap) and when you must explicitly manage disk-based data separately from RAM-based data.
(if pointy-haired-boss
(progn 'do-politics)
(format t "write code & enjoy ;-)"))

You don't need the progn. :)
There is no best - but like others have said Debian or CentOS.
done, on the OP
Secrets for making your advice sound more interesting:

1. Put it in the form of bullet points

2. Call it "secret"
The article misses the key point about why IT workers aren't promoted into management more often. It's a conundrum many of us here have faced.

If you're any good, remaining a technician pays MORE than becoming a manager.

Would you rather solve problems and build cool stuff or deal with B.S. all day long?

Those who can do. Those who can't manage.
You shouldn't use no triple negatives neither.
Proof I Am Not Radio Active
i don't know how this will be received my facebook users. If history has taught us anything, it will not be received well.
Looking for Ruby developers in Toronto
Avid Life Media is looking for Ruby rockstars to join our team in Toronto. Avid Life Media is a network of niche online destinations. We most recently acquired HotOrNot (http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/02/11/hotornot-apparently-very-hot-acquired-for-20-million/) and 3 of the top 100 Facebook apps.

Avid has a strong management team with a great track record for creating profitable companies (and two IPOs).

We are now looking to develop a world class engineering team in Toronto that is passionate about building consumer facing web apps from the ground up.

Entrepreneurial? Think you have what it takes? Email raja[at]avidlifemedia[dot]com
Scientists Know Better Than You--Even When They're Wrong
Smell the Roses Already: 4 OSs that Should Be Open Source
I don't know what industry you work in, but everywhere I've worked (in financial services IT) managers were better paid than those they managed - often very significantly so.
The basic claim here seems to be that there is little use for deep, rigorous algorithmic thinking in the monotonous day to day work of business applications that constitutes the majority of paid programming work.

Why does this lessen the value of books like Knuth and CLRS? And what does it say about the boring projects the author works on?

The truth is, in a business app, wiring up the interface to a database is usually not the hard part. The hard part is dealing with political bullshit, dealing with people, making sure the interface is right, gathering domain knowledge and understanding users' needs, deciding what features matter and which don't given your budget and time constraints, and other things that have little to do with J2EE, .Net, and other ephemeral daycoder staples: these are high-level issues anti-intellectual philistines like the author of this post flatly refuse to acknowledge the significance of.

It is possible to artificially fabricate situations in a business where invoking deep, powerful ideas from computer science is necessary. But often there is a much simpler solution that necessitates much simpler techniques: this is the right thing to go for, even though solving the wrong problem may have an appealing, elegant solution that proves that you're a really smart person. Knowing when to be a fancypants computer science whiz and when to make a 5 line call to an existing library is really where maturity and mastery come in to software development, IMO.
There is no substantive content about any of Knuth's books in this article. I don't believe the author has read any of the books - most people commenting on Knuth haven't. The piece is just incoherent rambling about how math is hard - NOT something that should be voted to #1 on the front page of anywhere, especially HN.yc.

The following excerpt sums it up:

"...I am an average man, with an average IQ. I could have have failed the Mathematics exam of 10th class in 1996. I was very poor at Mathematics and I was expecting only 22 or 34 marks out of 100 and anything less than 33 means you have failed the exam but I purchased 2 very heavy-books of Mathematics, which our teacher called best references books for 10th class and studied them at the cost of my health for 2 months and then I got 83 marks but those health problems, the pain in the neck are still with me after 12 years ) . Since I was weak in Mathematics may be thats why I don’t like Knuth’s style ..."
Corollary: Make a product people want AND are willing to pay for it.

That last part is incredibly important.
The emphasis on speed could also be detrimental to startups not building the next "killer app." Growing too fast too soon can result in some debilitating growing pains.
Does it matter? The guys who made Twitter are unit testing fanatics and it doesn't seem to have helped their situation.
Writing Maintainable Code Considered Harmful
When I first started in IT I worked in a help desk where all day I'd write clones of popular games in Excel with VBA. Half to pass the time, and half to practise and get noticed by the "real programmers"(it worked).

After doing it for a bit I found lots of other people doing the same thing. Now it seems cloning these games in Javascript is all the rage. I think it's a great progression.

*edit: just wanted to add, the reason for using VBA/Excel for me and at least a few of the other people at the time that I found doing it was that our workplaces closely monitored the running applications of lowly helpdesk staff to ensure no slacking but excel was an approved application so seeing Excel in the process list from their admin console was all good.
Amazing thought! Having a business model outside of "exit" is really important but does not receive enough emphasis.
I dont have any experience with hardware, but have developed using Ericsson's Parlay X libraries and they are very easy to use:

http://www.ericsson.com/mobilityworld/sub/open/technologies/...

Its a useful library if the service provider you're trying to gain access to exposes Parlay X access to their network. Very easy to send/receive SMS, MMS, etc from your web application as they library wraps all the SOAP calls for you.
The last three startups I have been a part of, all used ADP. I was not part of the decision making, but I thought it was worth noting.
Using a search also helps to avoid potential typo domain versions of a website.
Maybe you should try something other than financial services.

(My experience in health care, government, insurance, and financial services is that "normal" rules of business and supply/demand don't always apply. They have worked hard for 100 years to insulate themselves.)
Ask YC: Entrepreneurs vs Builders
This is an ill-formed question/debate topic that I've wanted to broach for a while. Sorry if it's not as clear as could be hoped, but it's sort of a vague notion.

One of the things I've liked about PG and his writing is that I get a sense of a hacker figuring out enough business stuff to make a go of it, and consequently flipping the company: as a hacker, he was never going to want to stay on the business side anyway. PG strikes me as a "builder" - someone with lots of technical ability who goes out and creates things. Incidentally, I also see myself as being more along those lines than a "business guy".

"Entrepreneurs" on the other hand, are those "wheeler dealer" type of guys who are really good at putting together various people and other aspects of a business. They are kind of technical, but not the guys who go out and build something really cool themselves. They're the classic business starters, in my opinion.

So - what do you guys think of "builders" vs "entrepreneurs" in this day and age?
Thanks. I have your session on my schedule. The sessions I'm interested in lean towards Ruby on Rails hobbyist hacking outside of work but I am hoping to pitch RoR to the entrenched Java/XSD/WebServices folks at my company (which is where yours fits nicely, e.g. a RESTful interface to our ERP apps).

Using jQuery with Ruby, Entrepreneurs On Rails, Oh the Fail I've Known, 23 Hacks...z80 assembler, The Profitable Programmer, ..Titanic.. are the sessions I'm most intrigued in based solely on text descriptions.

Side note: Integration Testing with RSpec's Story Runner - one of my co-workers saw him speak and said the guy is really good
I've always thought Knuth was quite entertaining and droll, even in his scientific work. Like the time he showed up for Randall Munroe's Google talk and asked about the n log (log n) sort algorithm discovered by his dark apprentice Elaine.
http://xkcd.com/342/

I think the problem with reviews like this one that say "I wish this guy had written a different book" is that they refuse to take the work and the author on their own terms. TAoCP is obviously on a mission to rigorously define algorithms at the heart of computer science, compare them, and make provable statements about their complexity. On those grounds, none of the pedagogical texts the author prefers holds a candle to the blinding glory of TAoCP. (Of course, they weren't really trying to.)

It's the same with all kinds of art. Come to it full of expectations that the art doesn't fulfill, and you won't make the connection... but that's not the art's fault.
This was my cue to take my exit to the back button:

Though they were programming books but they were not
written to show you the reality of what happens when you
use scp to copy file over a network. *How that scp program
looks like and Why it is so strange at 1st.* Those books
will never tell you ( in code ) that their could be
errors, their could be failures, their could be some
problem in making a connection, that, for obvious
reasons, you have to use ” -ansi -pedantic -Wall -Wextra”
while working with GCC but all we learned were TURBO C
and a book on DOS 6.2 ( this shitty-book had cost me my
precious 600 rupees )I put Knuth in the same category. He
just explains, explains and explains the algorithms, with
100% Mathematics, in the most detailed manner ever done
and leaves the applications of those algorithms up to
you. They are not designed for people like me.

He would rather read a book that tells him about the possible errors that the scp program might print out instead of a Knuth book. Got it. Back to my regularly scheduled programming.
Classic Papers in the History of Psychology
Another service gets TC'd thanks to Hacker News
Unit testing is not load testing.
Would you classify Steve jobs as a "builder" or an "entrepreneur"? i think for any would be successful startup founder, you have to swing both ways. just my 2 cents.
I don't see it waning. I do see it dissolving more into general programming practice, as opposed to being a big deal in and of itself. What does seem to be waning is the evangelical fervor surrounding it, which seems like a good thing to me (though not to the author). Like other fads in software, unit testing was oversold.

Meanwhile, the logic of the article seems weak:

1. A company that claimed to auto-generate unit tests for your code failed? Give me a break. You can't write good tests without understanding what you're testing. If it could do that, why didn't it just auto-generate all your code in the first place? One needn't look far to see why this failed.

2. Few OSS tools have been adopted (except xUnit which is used massively)? This is normal. Most open source projects fail, a few succeed big. xUnit won. You don't need much else.

3. Not everyone teaches it? Why should everyone do anything?

4. Not many new unit testing books? There are many such books already. What don't they cover? Why should there be a whole book about JUnit 4?

5. Alternative unit-testing frameworks aren't used... see #2.

The author seems to think of unit testing as if it were a domain. It isn't, it's a technique. Why should there be an industry around it?
Pressure to publish? He has published 5-6 posts a week since 2004. His rate hasn't changed, and if you page through his pre-ad archives, the quality ratio is about the same as now.
Tinypy 1.1
Redeye VC: Depending on pending...(A VC's perspective on patents)
Seriously. I find it difficult to take advice from her after some of the stuff she writes on her blog.