skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Some of my favorites that I've written or come across...

From the BitTorrent client source, an apt comparison:

This function is like a boat made of shit, floating on a river of shit.

From my .emacs file:

;; Fucking RMSmacs (by version 21.3, but after 21.1) doesn't
;; fucking make these fucking variables local where it fucking
;; should, so the c-set-style we're about to do below breaks
;; fucking fill-paragraph for fucking all non-c-like modes by
;; fucking default. Someone desperately needs to die, and I'm
;; pretty sure it's not just me.

This one doesn't include swearing, but is in the same spirit. From the Audiogalaxy server, above a huge chunk of regular-expression-based string munging code:

/*

sah's take on all this:

"Cursed the ground where dead thoughts live new and oddly bodied,
and evil the mind that is held by no head. [...] For it is of old
rumour that the soul of the devil-bought hastes not from his
charnal clay, but fats and instructs the very worm that gnaws;
till out of corruption horrid life springs, and the dull
scavengers of earth wax crafty to vex it and swell monstrous to
plague it. Great holes secretly are digged where earth's pores
ought to suffice, and things have learnt to walk that ought to
crawl."

-The Necronomicon
Google has said that they intend to offer an "AppStore" for Android, much like Apples.

The differences however will be:
1) You do not have to use it.
2) They will take much less than 30% (so they say)

While I agree with you for small-scale apps made by individuals, I think AppStore is a problem for startups looking to monetize their apps on a larger scale. 30% is a huge chuck off your total revenue any way you slice it. And remember, there is no legal alternative to AppStore for the iPhone.
Why are you getting snarky? I was perfectly serious. I think it's best to ignore silly things. Most people seem to give them a lot of attention. That's important. I want to know why they do that.

Possibly related, many people I know find it easier to think of things to say in reply to stuff that's mistaken than in reply to stuff that's accurate. So they spend more time engaging with mistakes than thinking about the good ideas they encounter. That's important too.
There's swearing in comments, then there's:

cmd/xfe/editordialogs.c: fuck = fe_file_name_int_my_directory(context, buf, link_text);
cmd/xfe/editordialogs.c: if (fuck && fuck[0] != '\0') {
I quite like it. I would restrict the pop-up/preview images to appear only when the user hovers over the link and not when they are in-line with the link - it gets pretty annoying very quickly.
It was my impression that in most cases powers derived by treating a crime as 'terrorism' were instated via the USA PATRIOT act.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USA_PATRIOT_Act#Title_VIII:_Ter...]
Consider any bandwidth user who doesn't use p2p software: Suppose they download 3 movies per night from iTunes. On my connection movies take about 10 minutes each to download. That's 30 minutes of 100% capacity out of each 24 hour day. Add in a fraction more for email, IM, web surfing, etc.

Now compare this to a P2P user who utilizes 100% of upstram and 100% of downstream bandwidth capacity 24/7.

It is a massive, massive difference. You can organize the "typical" vs "p2p" users a variety of ways, but even the most intense consumer of internet video barely scratches the surface.

ISPs are simply in the business of repackaging bandwidth. They buy bandwidth in bulk (which is typically symmetric for upstream and downstream, and they repackage it as residential bandwidth having much more downstream bandwith and just enough upstream to not inhibit downstream traffic.

They also buy bandwidth that requires super-expensive dedicated hardware and repackage it so that a $50 cable modem can provide a "reliable enough" connection in a consumer's home.

The reason bandwidth costs about $60/month for a 16 megabit connection (the price I pay currently) is because there are a lot of assumptions made about what constitutes 'typical' residential use. Part of the profit model of an ISP comes from bandwidth speculation. Just as a commodity speculator may buy pork belly futures from a farmer in expectation of future actual hogs, ISPs buy large amounts of bandwidth from major backbone providers with the expectation of being able to resell it as residential bandwith. The assumption on which all of this is based is a typical residential user's actual usage pattern.

ISPs have found that residential users prefer high peak download speed over anything else, so they package and price accordingly.

All that would happen if P2P use increases is that ISPs would be forced to increase bandwidth prices on everyone in order to remain profitable. So in effect, net neutrality will force everyone who doesn't use their residential connection in an atypical way to subsidize those who do.

You are correct that an ISP could redirect all DNS bounces or worse, but it is unlikely that such things would get out of control due to competition from other firms. If there is insufficient competition, that is an antitrust issue, it has nothing to do with "net neutrality".

Net neutrality is simply one interest group trying to get the government to meddle with the pricing scheme that has been voluntarily created by one firm and is preferred and accepted by the vast majority of consumers.
"I guess, that's the point of the author, to enforce encapsulation, but by limiting the actions to only "verbs", the author is restricing the user of that object to what he thinks he should be doing."

Yes, this is definitely one of the tenants of (at least some definitions of) Object Oriented programming. Arguments for this include giving an object the ability to ensure some kind of contract is maintained, which becomes impossible if you can arbitrarily change certain values without making sure that other values are also updated appropriately. Making data private and making all changes only through public methods makes it possible to guarantee that data inside the object remains in a consistent state.

You may not find this a convincing argument, but it is a widely accepted part of OO methodology.
Using CSS to Fix Anything: 20+ Common Bugs and Fixes
You could hide the tags by default and only show them when it's needed. They're quite annoying.
New jaanix lets you "tune" on people. Feedback?
Do you guys agree with me on net neutrality?
As for the suit, you're a developer, not a consultant for What Not to Wear. The real tragedy is when the developer shows up for the interview in his (so-called) nice button up shirt (that has a small gravy stain on the pocket) and polished (yet orthopedic looking) black shoes.

The suit gains you 5 seconds of respect until you open your mouth. Then hopefully you will actually know something.

Do yourself a favor; instead of taking an hour the night before to make sure your shirt is pressed and your socks match get on the web, research the company you are interviewing at, try to assess some of the problems that they may encounter, study up on the languages that they utilize, review your algorithms book, and treat the interview like you're applying for the lead position for the development of an auto-pilot software system for a Boeing 787.

If you know your field and know it well superficialities such as a wrinkled shirt will take a back seat.
Honda Unveils Zero-emission Car
Market Erases Losses as Crude Falls
The Deal: Still Underwater on This Inflation Thing
That little "free" image is ostentatious, obnoxious, and silly.
You have to document it in board meeting, and spell out the terms of the repayment. If you want to keep liability protection. From what I understand, if the opposing lawyer can successfully argue that you appear to be commingling funds and not operate as two seperate, distinct entities. How this is determined is not so much by a clear set of rules so much as a set of heuristics. They look at the formalities you've done, and other things such as how much you have loaned versus how much the corp was capitalized as (laibility-to-equity ratio) -- you'll want to ask your lawyer what is the best way to go about loaning money to your company, how often and how much you can do so.
I was trying to create a bigger target, but I can see what you mean. Better now?
Delta Airlines Plans to Cut 4,000 Jobs
I would put the "separate multiple tags by spaces" right beside or under the search box rather than having to click the little life preserver.

Or why not leave the message out altogether and unclutter the interface. If the user enters commas you can just convert them to spaces on the fly.
Oh. I replied because it was fun to do so, and because I'm in an epic bout of procrastination.
Big Tech Apple and Intel: Best buddies
(a) that's not at all true, about "terrorism" and the PATRIOT act.

(b) prosecutors say crazy stuff all the time to scare defendants, and defense counsel routinely invents stories about prosecutorial misconduct.

The only thing that it appears we do know about this case is that the guy committed a felony, and his excuse was, "lookin' for UFOs".
Yeah, comments in my code are "notes to self" as much as anything. When I come back, I want to know what I was thinking. If I've commented like that it means I've thought about it and drawn a conclusion, rather than just skipped it as unimportant.
Technorati would be nice, but their api does not return tags, which means that I can't create a cloud of related tags.

The public search (the search box on the main page) is only half of the available functionality. For the other half you have to register and login. I appreciate your suggestion to move the search box and I'll seriously consider it, but I fear it will put too much focus on the public search.
I couldn't agree more, I searched for "dog" and I had to scroll and scroll and scroll to get to my results.

Also, the line "Tags used to be all over the place", trips me up when I scan/read it.
Good point. I guess the only possible legal alternative to the AppStore is an application installed via the AppStore that does the same thing, but the odds of Apple allowing something like that to be listed on AppStore are near nil.
How would you expand on this? Should it let you do the same on your RSS feeds? Should it be a an aggregator like friendfeed? Or be a twitter client? How would you use it?
There's an escaping issue: if I type '\', the search box comes back with '\\'.

edit: similar issue with the single quote (')
do you have a link to that? I stumbled on some functional php stuff before but it didn't appear to be that active? I've been dabbling with my own stuff combining functional concepts with fluent expressions. It yields some surprisingly succinct solutions which look a lot like python list comprehensions actually.
The t-shirt and jeans can wait until you've proven yourself for a few months.

There's no contradiction between what I said and what you're saying -- we just happen to want different jobs. I don't want a job which has expectations for clothing beyond "yes please".

It's up to the original poster to decide what sort of job he wants and dress appropriately for that -- odds are, the job he wants is one which neither of us would want.
That's true on the sole hacker level. If you're considering writing some mobile apps, and the iphone seems like a nice platform, then learning a new language for the purpose should seem like an opportunity, not a problem.

However, I guess the article refers to a mobile app shop that wants to make money, and that's when economic considerations set in. New language/framework means an investment in re-training your (mostly average) developers. Objective-C vs. Java also means having a tougher time locating experienced developers. In short, it makes less business sense.
Joel has also elsewhere that he's a big believer in paying salesmen incentives in cash (via commissions), so I don't think he'd disagree with you there.
I guess it depends on the job, but I can't stand people in suits. It's so obsolete now. That kind of tired attention to surface conformity only encourages the same old thinking that is responsible for everything sucking. Wear what is comfortable and looks decent. The sooner the puritanical idea that you have to dress yourself in that ridiculous, uncomfortable costume and prance around like some peacock samurai in full ceremonial garb to be a serious job applicant dies, the better off we will all be.

Don't view the cover letter as artifical. View it as the HR guy will spend two minutes looking at it while waiting for his internet porn to download. What do you have to say about yourself that is so compelling he'll not notice when two minutes pas and his porn finished downloading because he's still looking at your resume. I'll give you a hint, it's not that you wake up early.
Quality has nothing to do with testing
A reminder for software people that testing and QA often have little to do with the quality of your product.
Too slow.

Also, I get the tag cloud thing, but there are just too many to process. There has to be a better UI in there somewhere--something like displaying the now biggest ones first and then asking for more.
Seriously hilarious fake rant.
Having come up against the dress code issue recently - the standard advice is to make your best guess about the dress code hierarchy and dress one level higher than the job you're applying for.

The covering letter should be seen as the chance to make an argument as to why you're the right person for this specific job. You shouldn't really have a template for your covering letter.
While the original article talked about accessors, the argument was really against publicly accessible properties on objects - even readonly properties. As demallien correctly argues, this approach breaks MVC.

It's not stated outright, but the original author obviously has a Java or C++ background. The Java & C++ syntaxes for accessing a getter are different from those for accessing a public member, and as a result Java/C++ programmers almost always write accessors for all properties because it will be hard to change later.
Basically, there are two kinds of companies: the ones that do care about dress code, and the ones that don't. The first kind would like you to wear a suit (with a tie). For the second kind: well, since they don't care, you can wear a suit as well! In this way, you can't go wrong (I've never encountered a company requiring people to wear used jeans and Rock band shirts anyway).
This makes so much sense that it amazes me how many times I've run into shops that haven't even bothered to TRY doing this.

Most of the shops I've worked at that have existing systems have setups that require days of effort to get working. One developer I ran into couldn't get the stuff he'd written to compile on anyone else's machine, so his method for deployment was to build it, jar it up, copy the jar over to the target machine, unpack the jar, and clean stuff up.

Needless to say, he'd been working on a product for that company for around six years, and not only was it not finished, but no one, including him, could explain what it did to anyone.
could you use the restful interface that they have a la their feeds?

http://technorati.com/tag/ycombinator+2007
http://feeds.technorati.com/tag/ycombinator+2007

etc..

well, if you want to highlight both the search and the register, make them both stand out. i just don't feel like my eyes are attracted to them. i don't immediately know what i'm supposed to be doing on your page when i first load it up. i have to go look and read, and thats a problem, imo. where they are looks more de-emphasized, like supporting text, to me.
No, but I make up for it when speaking normally.
I don't want employees that spend all that time fretting over what they wear. I want employees that would look at me funny if I asked them to dress nice. I'd want to see a funny, bewildered, slightly pained look on their face that said "I'm one of the best people at what I do, I'm doing important work, I could work anywhere, each second I waste on this is something that doesn't go into designing the future, and you want me to worry about wearing what?"
"quality" comes from development

"quality assurance" comes from testing, where you're checking to make sure the product is quality, to make sure development actually produced quality code.
I have an S-Corp for my technology startup and it works great.

The main thing regarding accounting is to create separate accounts for your business.

Its best to have a business checking account and credit card account exclusively for business.

If you pay for something from your personal account like your personal credit card simply show it as a loan from your business to yourself.

You can keep records in this manner until you reach tax filing season (mar 15 deadline). At that time you can use a CPA accountant to file your taxes and he should be able to assist you with your other questions.

Focus on keeping very accurate records and ethical in what is being used for business and you should have no problems during tax time.

If you are taking on a loan in exchange for shares, I would definitely advice you to get a lawyer to write out the terms and hopefully you can afford it then.
Acts As Community - The Social Network for Rubyists
Acts As Community is a social network that has been developing over the past couple of months for Rubyists to gather and communicate about the Ruby language and anything tangential to it (Rails, Merb, etc).

In addition to the standard social network features such as photos, videos, groups, and events, it features an open-source project directory directly integrated with GitHub and a Ruby job board.
use amazon s3
Is 280 North using this? Their "Objective-J" source code looks like a very similar idea, at least.
Well, unless you get interviewed by this guy:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fwYy8R87JMA
And the underlying article would be much more valuable if any of the solutions you give were mentioned.
That and more: Apple's platform probably won't be adopted by anyone else, so even though the user base is attractive right now, down the road it would look diminutive compared with the user base for an open platform that could gain support of multiple vendors.

7-8 years ago I used to develop mobile apps in both Palm OS (closed platform, just one vendor) and J2ME (open, widely adopted). Palm had the more attractive installed base back then, but as their fortunes changed, that investment is now worthless. Compare with J2ME, which kept growing thanks to support by most vendors.
Now I can't work out if you're being sarcastic or not.
Really good Basic MySQL Tutorial
I agree that today's current "power" users use way more bandwidth with their P2P traffic, as compared to people just viewing streaming videos. However, P2P is only becoming more and more mainstream. (One could argue that it already is mainstream when it comes to MP3 audio.) And with dedicated media devices becoming more prevalent, downloading video around-the-clock isn't going to be so rare.

So my point still stands that users are only becoming greater consumers of bandwidth over time, and it's simply not sufficient for the major internet providers to pretend that all anyone will ever want to do with their net connections is check email.
Kawasaki was promoting it too: http://twitter.com/guykawasaki/statuses/836033828
I did download it, read a few pages and was convinced too it's all fluff, nothing useful, practical or actionable.
What’s wrong with GUIs
as a reddit, hacker news, digg clone, jaanix really is better, but unfortunately it doesn't have the community behind it (at least when I visit). I think I would rather it be an RSS reader, or something similar to that... It's obviously good at filtering, and I think that applies really well to doing things with RSS.

EDIT (adding more): What about a big giant pool of people's RSS feeds to get content? You could then filter on users (by filtering on which feeds they subscribe too). You like @rms and @pg for instance, but aren't so interested in @apgwoz's feeds... Though, I'm not sure, that seems like it'd be of limited value.
I'm located in the northern parts of Europe so perhaps that explains it but I routinely and deliberately use foul language in technically oriented internal documents. The rationale being that it should be harder to copy'n'paste and edit it in an ad hoc sales doc than to ask me for a more specific technical explanation.
A cover letter that's actually responsive to the position/company is a giant win. But also, a polite email with that same info counts as a "cover letter". ("Cover letter" describes the role it plays introducing you, not the formalities of delivery/medium.)
I'd rather hire someone who is comfortable in any situation (mechanics clothes or business suit) than a rigid smartass who won't change they way he or she dresses no matter what...
I like it. Couple of comments:

1) search seems slow to me. What are you using for indexing?

2) Limit the results and display larger tags toward the top - search is about displaying the most relevant
My company is completely casual, in fact my boss dresses more casually than I do, but I still expect every interview candidate suited and booted - it's no different from expecting no spelling mistakes on their CVs.
I searched for "photography," but I was given a tag cloud of things. Why did I not just get results for "Photography"? Did I just miss them?

EDIT: Yes, I did. They appeared WAYYY down below. Please move the tag cloud under the more important results.... or let the user refine the search with a smaller (maybe it could expand on click) "refine search tag cloud"
To me at least, a suit is a tool to be used where it will give me leverage I would not otherwise have. It's a social hack to get access to both places and people. Personally I prefer not to work in one, but for important meetings or for working directly with (formal, older) customers then it's worth putting on the monkey suit.
Umm, yeah. And if a candidate had spelling mistakes on his resume, would you think "well, I'm hiring him to code, not to write documentation"? Or would you in fact not even bother to interview him at all?
Taking payment for Subscriptions 
We want to be able to offer paid subscription accounts on our site for advanced features. Any recommendations on what services to use to collect payments?
On a quick overview Amazon seemed incredibly expensive while something like Google checkout didn't seem to offer recurring payments.
What are the hidden gems you are using to facilitate these transfers?

Also, we are using Django.
This is really, really nitpicking. I don't notice any of the things he listed.
its was procedural, a basic Muslim burial - clean the body, wrap in a white blanked, and bury the body. So pretty simple from that standpoint.
Who develops desktop applications anymore anyway (except maybe game developers).

If in the past you used to build apps for windows because that's where the installed base was, nowadays you build web apps.

I learned Delphi and VB back then when I wanted to hack together simple utilities with lots of UI. In the last couple of years I learned Django and Rails for the same purpose.
They can consider it whatever they like, so long as they pay me :-)
> "We wear t-shirts because clothes don't matter, but if you wear a suit you're unfit for startup hacker life."

That puts into words my vaguely-formed concept of why I defiantly wear dress pants and expensive shirts (+ suit and tie for interviews) even when working at a tech startup with 20-somethings in (carefully chosen) worn jeans and t-shirts.

If clothes don't matter, why am I being judged because I value aesthetics, not excluding the clothes I wear?
Developers, developers, developers ignoring, ignoring, ignoring Vista, Vista Vista
Somehow that whole Firefox affair is bugging me. Firefox is a free product, it doesn't come with anything, it costs nothing to buy or use - so exactly what right do people have to say that it should do or not do something (use Google search)?

And yes, I realize that maybe there is some legal right or something or the sort because of the existence of the Mozilla Foundation, but nonetheless...