skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Alternatively, perhaps it is time to treat MSFT like the dividend stock that it is, acknowledge that it has probably peaked as an industry force, and channel the slowly ebbing value accumulated into shares of MSFT into grand philanthropic ventures.

I think Bill chose this route.
Was just thinking the same thing. How hard would it be to use the API to pull data into a csv format? That seems to be what his main gripe was, after all.
Related to question: which font is preferable for reading long texts on a computer?
The most important ICANN announcement: Introduction of non-Roman character domains
Disappointment #2 is storing the passwords in plain text.
Not really. But it obviously came across that way. I'm still working on making my prose as readable as my code :-)

Looking back, I can't imagine I would ever talk like that to anyone here, and certainly anyone in person. But since I was responding to a pseudonym from a passing blog, I took a few liberties.

Everyone should be allowed one pass. I guess this one was mine.
The password was given out, or the password was changed? Encryption, people...
how will users with North American keyboards access websites with characters not on their keyboards?
I think he wrote carefully --- his critique is funny, a fast read, and works on multiple levels (as a parody of your writing style, as a reasoned criticism of your argument, and as a takedown of the cult of personality that surrounds you). I don't think either of your arguments are particularly careful anymore.

But you're right, if one chooses to be harshly analytical about your essay, it is indeed hard to pin you down to something that can be refuted directly.

Again: he wrote something clever and funny about you. You should be flattered. Right now, you really just seem petulant.
You clearly haven't read any of what we're talking about.
"I have made this letter longer than usual, because I lack the time to make it short" - Blaise Pascal (French mathematician)
This can also sometimes be achieved with math. For example, I was writing code that handled velocity and animation based on the arrow keys. The character had to change animations depending on 8 directions - nesw & diagonals. At first I had an ugly if-elseif statement handling all the keystates. But then I realized I could come up with a cool scheme to simplfy and beautify the code. I also needed to solve the problem of having a constant max-velocity that stayed the same even when going in a diagonal.

//which direction to go
dirX = 0;
dirY = 0;
if( keystate[SDLK_LEFT] ) dirX--;
if( keystate[SDLK_RIGHT]) dirX++;
if( keystate[SDLK_UP] ) dirY--;
if( keystate[SDLK_DOWN]) dirY++;

if( dirX == 0 && dirY == 0){
//stand still
heroVelX = 0;
heroVelY = 0;

heroAnimation = heroStill[oldHeroDirIndex];
} else {
//run in a direction
angle = atan2(dirY,dirX);
heroVelX = heroSpeed * cos(angle);
heroVelY = heroSpeed * sin(angle);

oldHeroDirIndex = (dirX+1)*3 + (dirY+1);
heroAnimation = heroRunning[oldHeroDirIndex];
}

//step to next frame in animation
if( ++heroAnimation->curFrame >= heroAnimation->numFrames ) heroAnimation->curFrame = 0;

heroX += heroVelX;
heroY += heroVelY;

-removes conflict from pressing left and right or up and down at the same time
-uses a formula to calculate which animation to use, instead of using switch statement
-uses a little bit of trig to keep max-speed constant

Programming like this is very rewarding, if only for the feeling you get when it works. I guess this isn't really a big deal to any of you, but this sucker used to be 70 repetitive and buggy lines, rather than the pretty 29 it is now.
files and sockets are easy to attempt reconnection if something blows up. is it as easy with pipes and shared memory?

This article contains some interesting viewpoints about shared memory: http://nerdwisdom.com/2007/08/23/programming-erlang/
Off topic: Antagonyms
"Okay, it doesn't work out for the employees who become redundant, but that's to be expected." This is actually, you know, a really bad thing for them. They have families and no trust funds.
This depends on the OS but you can usually just switch the keyboard language, use alt codes or load from a character map app. Chances are if you don't know how to write the script, you won't know how to read the language being used either.
Any VMware experts out there?
Ask YC: Non web startup - solar?
Hi there. I have a small startup that brings in enough money (and a little more) to fund my lifestyle. With the awareness now of high energy prices I'm wondering about starting up a company installing solar panels for residential use. Anyone have any knowledge of this and do youthink its a good/crazy idea. This is a tech-related forum generally so I thought I'd ask :) Hope you don't mind!!
Not movies, but the premise to a large percentage of all sit-coms ever made.
Microsoft Launches Hosted Exchange Deals
the cloud is easy to access from anywhere, as long as you have internet connectivity.
am forget my password of mac,did you give me password on new email marko.[redacted]@yahoo.com

My response, even if I were a paid customer service rep, would have been: "What?"

Seriously, "did" instead of "could"? No capital letters? No space between the comma and "did"? Etc. etc. etc. The mail just doesn't make any sense. Reading it makes me want to cry.
Which way will Twitter go?
I am waiting for a new Mac Book.
IDEs can't read your code for you. So VeryLongIdentifiers should still be replaced with something that's easier to scan.
15 Internet Sites That Can Make or Break Your Brand
I think once you load the context of any given program into your head, the variable names become irrelevant. Programming on my TI-83 in elementary school, all I got was A-Z, but when I spent every class making a checkers game in TI-basic, I never forgot that C was the X-dimension of the current selection, Q was the number of black pieces left, and matrix [B] was the last saved game
It depends also on how you characterize your deadlines. If you allow slippage when things take longer than expected, or to adapt to changing requirements, you can impose deadlines without laying the hammer down.

In the end though, that ends up being more a case of managing scope than of imposing deadlines.

Give the developers a well-defined scope, and unless they're putzes, they'll get the job done. Give them a hard deadline, and either they'll slip or they'll do shoddy work.

Most projects base everything on deadlines. As a result, most of them deliver shoddy projects, and the company ends up with something that either doesn't work, or it works barely but that requires far more maintenance than the project's scope justifies.
What Every American Needs to Know (and Do) About FISA Before Tuesday Voting
True enough. But yeah, definitely should've been a followup, one without the password to the account.
He handles it incredibly poorly. All of his comments throughout the thread are, "I'm right, you're wrong, this is a good UI." Sure, he admits there may be room for improvement, but he also blatantly disregards useful advice from potential customers (and recognized experts in the field), and in many cases directly insults them.
It's also available in MacPorts and Fink, I believe.
I want to work on what is next, to help people take those next steps into the unknown. I have no interest in taking anyones money for something I don’t truly believe in, and the problem is I’m finding less and less to believe in.

This is the pernicious downside of taking hype seriously. Yeah, the highs are great, but the lows are really, really low. This poor guy has inhaled so much of the Web 2.0 smoke that he's having withdrawal symptoms.

Software engineering is a craft, like carpentry, or knitting, or writing, or composing. You need to practice it for years to get good at it. You need to learn to love the calm moments, the practice sessions, the details, the act of fixing little things, or you'll never attain the skill or sustain the long-term exertion that is needed for great work.

Not everything you write will be a work of genius, and not everything you do will change the world -- nor should it. There is a time to be bold and flashy, and a time to buckle down and solve people's old-fashioned but real (and occasionally renumerative) problems.

And there's a time to go on vacation. This is what a guy who has burned out is like: The wonders of everyday life all seem stale and unprofitable to him. He needs to take up a hobby. He needs a housecall from Tim Ferriss, stat.

From the bottom of the page:

As well as providing web and mobile design services, they are currently endeavoring to create six products in one year.

Yeah, that might explain the burnout. How about trying to create one decent product over six years? What is this guy trying to prove with this senseless sprint?
Sure, but you don't get the color :)
MS's free as in beer virtual server, perhaps?
Yahoo! has a brand and name recognition, and many Yahoo! users are non-techie people who are barely even keeping up with what's going on. I doubt the exodus of Yahoo! VPs or whatever Icahn does will affect their choice of search engine. Microsoft is buying Yahoo! for it's users and brand, not for its employees or technology. So in a sense, "destroying Yahoo!" is just fine with Microsoft if it doesn't drive users and advertisers away.
Why do you insist on making this a flame war? Sit down and write a program that makes 10M trivial system calls (getpid() is a good choice) and one that calls a function to return a constant integer 10M times.

I'm sorry, but you seem to have a wildly inflated idea of the speed of system calls on modern OSs. The real world just doesn't work like that. This is my last post on this thread.
The Trouble With Tribbles: the birth, sale, and final production of one episode
I strongly favor avoiding the Bay Area (my startup is in Chicago and New York). I'm ambivalent about this essay. But one specific point:

The author claims VC doesn't limit investments by geography. If you have a track record, that's true: the people who started Postini can found a tech startup in Yellowknife AB and get a round from somebody. But I've successfuly gotten an A round before, and been a part of multiple successful exits, and we did the circuit out west, and they absolutely do want you to be out there with them.

This isn't a reason to move out west, because you don't want that money anyways, but let's be real.
Yea, being somewhat below 50% growth in sales for a year is "Trouble".
Actual content starts at page 21.
"The difficulty of concurrency lies in the problem itself, not the API."

Isn't it possible that it's both? Concurrency is hard, but I think the classical threading model makes it harder. There are simplifications that really do make it easier to reason about concurrency, like doing all inter-thread communication via queues, OpenMP-style "parallelize this for loop" constructs, and pure-functional immutable data structures.
I agree with much of that assessment provided Arrington's version of what really happened is true. That seems to be a big if though.

I doubt anyone knows what really happened on both ends. Pretty much the only thing we know for sure is that Yahoo's board did not act in the best interest of its shareholders.

Also, say what you want about it from a moral standpoint, but ensuring that people either take you seriously or suffer tremendously for not doing so is good business. They're ensuring that in the future, any potential acquirees will be very fearful of pissing off Microsoft, which is very good for them. It's more than just an ego-driven Ballmer being a douche bag, it's sound strategy.
My first reaction is: be wary!

Not that it's a bad idea, but that retrofit residential stuff is such a pain in the ass (been there, done that (home automation and security installations)).

If you do pursue this, I would suggest you do what I figured out rather quickly: concentrate on only new construction and only custom homes. Forget the retrofit, and forget the tract-home developers where the builders just want to turn the units quickly and not get the homebuyers distracted with fancy add-ons.

Also, depending on what state you're in, certifications and regulations can be cumbersome also. And lastly (well, not last, I could go on about this for days...) if you haven't done this before, getting decent E&O and general liability insurance will be somewhere between expensive and impossible, many insurers don't want to insure someone with no experience running around a $400K jobsite with fancy power tools and equipment.

All the above being said, I would still say go for it under the right conditions. I personally find "hardware" startups 100 times more challenging and rewarding than web-app or general software startups. No offense to the software guys, it's just a whole different world when you are producing or working with physical goods.

If you do pursue it, contact me offline and I might be able to give you some advice and pointers about things, plus some other products you could carry/install that go along with the energy conservation theme.
After I read through his tirades I think he came out poorer for the wear. Much of his explanations are simply: blah blah we've done this for a long time blah blah. It's also clear he's opting for what he thinks is experience over Apple iPhone HIG.

The most glaring mistake he made was the background color. I mean seriously did everybody in the room while looking at this say "yeah, 33FFFF is the way to go!"
Great article, thanks guys.
> did you give me password on new email marko.[redacted]@yahoo.com

The reply was probably: "Yes I did. Apple thanks you for your business"
I agree. Some of the people who commented have very valid points, yet he disregards them. Seems very prideful and stubborn.
When you can do both that's called elegance. And a lot of people appreciate elegant and thoughtful design.
... now eagerly awaiting a Mac vs PC parody of this event.

Anyone got good suggestions?
Google evaporates Docs and Spreadsheets cloud
This is really a misunderstanding of "looking nice" and usability. This app doesn't look nice, but if it was an incredibly usable app with an ugly background color and ugly custom buttons, that would be somewhat understandable (I say somewhat only because Apple gives you beautiful looking graphics for free).

The problem is that this design is not usable. Design isn't how something looks, it is fundamentally how it works. The developer complains that these are really hard UI problems, and while I agree that UI is always difficult, Apple has already solved most of these issues in much more intuitive ways.

For example, the frequent trips section is redundant and confusing. If this app is really supposed to be "top down design" than this doesn't fit, because I've already been asked to enter mileage details and destination, but the frequent trips section already has all this information! Plus, the same screen shouldn't be used for inputting and editing this kind of information. One is something you do frequently, the other rarely -- they don't deserve the same placement in the UI. The Maps application on the phone uses bookmarks as data entry mechanisms, which is far more intuitive and lets you have a separate screen for managing them.
I saw this domain a while back and I bookmarked it: http://www.εργασία.gr So greek letters seem to be allowed.

If you search for it, you can see few more domains with greek letters: http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en-us&...
Unlike most antagonyms, "literally" only took on its opposite meaning when it was used hyperbolically--that is, when it was meant to be interpreted ironically/sarcastically. I guess now we've given up on the distinction, though.
Wow, different strokes. I wouldn't want anything to do with code that used variables like "SkuNdx" over a simple i, j, or k.

That said, ideally I prefer using languages with each or foreach or a similar construct. If you want to iterate over a set of objects, you should only have a variable for an object. Who cares about the index?

foreach( sku in skus )

Or

skus.each do { |sku| .... }

If you reserve i, j, k for cases where you actually need an index, I think you'll find that i has even more meaning: i is an index and it's presence means the index is actually important. That's a lot of meaning for a single letter.

With respect to what other programmers might do, I think "defensive" programming is a waste of energy. A bad programmer will screw up your code regardless of what you name a variable. The best you can do is avoid working with such people. If that doesn't work, write unit tests. Seriously, at least then you know that a bad programmer broke your code before you get a call.
Sure. And a reasonable discussion about that stuff and the tradeoffs involved (queues handlers need to be carefully balanced, for instance, and parallel loop constructs tend to drown CPUs in locking overhead) would be welcome. But the linked post was about "threads are bad, use secret sauce instead". There is no sauce.
I'm not sure how to work this into a joke, but I could never get reiser-fsck to ever work properly. So many filesystems lost...
Better than that in a sense. Seems to use a mixture of modern texture design, simulated bump-mapping, etc. So it's closer to modern games in terms of tricks, so the overall quality is hard to compare with older games. I think I'd have to say Quake II.

I have to say I'm very impressed. I recognize a lot of graphics tricks used by major corporations to optimize visuals in low-resource situations. There's some good tech behind this and it makes me a lot more hopeful for substantial cross-platform gaming growth.
Developing iPhone applications using Ruby on Rails
Often times a meaningful name suggests itself as the other replier to this comment pointed out: "for each post in posts..."

One has to wonder if that function in quest really has to be >= 150 LOC and absolutely can't be broken up. One has to wonder whether aftter programmers 1, 2 and 3 have worked on it, each adding 20-100 LOC, that the function doesn't really have 3 functions within it. In mainstream languages functions/subroutines/methods are like paragraphs: they should express one thing or action.
Does this notion generalize? Do pickup artists see women as 'looser?' I guess it works.
I wish I remember where I read that every good customer service relationship has two roles: The Complainer, and the Apologist. The secret to happiness is this: If your customer assumes one role, you must assume the other.

If your customer calls in anger and yells at you about Problem X, he's the Complainer. The proper response is to become the Apologist: "Gosh, I'm so sorry about X. I am filled with shame. It's entirely our fault that our product is filled with bugs; we should have embraced testing sooner and hired a better design team. I wish my parents had raised me better. Please don't hit me. We'll struggle to do better in the future, despite our haplessness. Here, have a free upgrade and a free support call."

If your customer calls and meekly reports that, oh, the software is great, and it's a real bargain, and he hates to even mention it, but Feature X really doesn't work... he's adopting the Apologist role. So you must become the Complainer: "WHAT? Feature X doesn't work! That is terrible! I can't believe we shipped a product with such an awful flaw! I'm going to fire the entire testing staff! Here, have a free upgrade and a free support call while I go shout at whomever is responsible for this travesty."

When people don't understand this rule, the situation often turns grim. Two Apologists risk descending into apathy: "Oh, this isn't really a problem, but..." "Well, yeah, that's not correct, but if it isn't really a problem..." "Gosh, though, it sure would be nice if you would fix it." "Well, okay, maybe... next week, sometime? Or maybe next month?"

A pair of Complainers risks an escalating argument that starts with insults and ends with lawsuits and violence.

(For a fun illustration of this, consider Monty Python's "dirty fork" sketch, in which the workers at a restaurant keep switching roles, from Apologist to Complainer to Extreme Apologist to Extreme Complainer to Suicidal Apologist to Homicidal Complainer, in dramatic and hilarious fashion, and the customer is completely confused. The sketch works because you get the sense, along with the customer, that the whole situation is somehow the customer's fault -- if he could just figure out which role to play, and adopt it, the situation would defuse. But the game is rigged: every time the customer picks a role the restaurant staff perversely adopts the same role and the situation escalates.)
This is why there's such a thing as libraries. When I want to read a file, I say (slurp path).
Google's Orkut Is Twice as Popular as Facebook...
I feel for Steve Pratt. Full disclosure: I've met him, in passing, at various handheld events over the years, but he wouldn't know me from Adam.

What I've found, and what he's caught in, is that data-entry applications for very specific problems, tend to get ugly. And that's ok, because the users are very, very savvy. If you look at the software his company builds, you'll find that 90% of it is for savvy, specialized users.

I spent hours agonizing over how 'ugly' an early iteration of a handheld app was after the users came back and said to make certain buttons and text bigger. Multisize buttons!? Different font sizes on the screen!? Crazy! And BAD!

But Fitts Law says (paraphrased) that big buttons are easier to hit. So make that button that everyone needs to hit 20 times an hour BIG. Even if it is ugly.

Some text you want to be able to see from a device lying on your desk. Some you don't care about until you need to squint at it. So size it differently.

I've come to believe that's all good.

What isn't defensible is the parts of this app that are just plain sloppy. The size of buttons not being the same, but being off by a few pixels. Spacing being wonky. Fonts for the sake of fonts.
The best you can do is avoid working with such people.

If only. I actually laughed out loud when I read that. Exactly what we just talked about over lunch. (How can someone be so smart, personable, and pleasant, and still write code like that.)

OTOH, another great argument for starting your own.
11 Powerful Firefox 3 Add-ons That Can Replace Standalone Applications
Pride and the Search for Happiness
How would you handle all of these people cracking jokes about your app? There's some thoughtful criticism in there, but mostly it's just one "UI Expert" posting up a screenshot of the app for other people to make fun of it.
I'm pretty sure it means that your calls would be billed to some other Sprint customer.
I'm not trivializing the matter. Nobody likes to fire and nobody likes to get fired. But a lot of people are let go after every merger - that's just how it works. So if a merger makes sense financially then you have no choice.
Because, in our society, rhetoric has become accepted as evidence.

How do your examples count as "rhetoric"?

Also, can you provide examples of any other societies, present or past, where this was different?
sounds like a good idea for a small service business. some markets would be better suited for it than others, though.
"but he also blatantly disregards useful advice from potential customers (and recognized experts in the field), and in many cases directly insults them"

I think he's possibly does worse than making an ass of himself. As "some random guy" who lurked into this flickr thread, he has successfully introduced me to an interesting type of product that I'd never heard of and successfully convinced me that he's not the guy to buy it from.

As a consumer, I can deal with a less-than-perfect UI, but someone who responds to criticism by hurling insults? No thanks.
yeah, that's what i meant, thought it would be obvious.
First Look At Genome, A Next-Gen Social Networking Service
Tetris is Hard, even to approximate.

http://arxiv.org/abs/cs.CC/0210020