skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Microsoft/Ballmer's behaviour has been entirely consistent with their reputation as take-no-prisoners bullies. Bullying is all about destroying and humiliating people. It is all about intimidating a crowd of people by making an example of someone.

I seriously doubt anyone, even Microsoft shareholders, are cheering Ballmer on. Actually, I revise this: I especially doubt Microsoft shareholders are cheering Ballmer on.

The key here is to understand what "Destroying Yahoo" means. Does it mean pillaging Yahoo and taking its assets? No. Instead, destroying Yahoo means putting its people and customers on the open market.

Who stands most to gain from Yahoo's people and customers being on the open market? Google, the market leader. ABove and beyond the deal Google has already done with Yahoo, Google has the most to gain from Yahoo' slide into irrelevance.

When at the end of this process Microsoft acquires Yahoo for a pittance, Ballmer will congratulate himself for paying so much less than B$44. But this is like setting fire to a house you wish to buy and then allowing its neighbours to build on what's left of the property.

Ballmer may take a victory lap, but I believe that Google will be the ones drinking champagne.
Cory Doctorow from Boing Boing wrote a much better article about switching to Linux from a Mac a couple of years ago. GIYF.
Customer Service is a Choice | ServiceLive Blog
Setting Up VNC Remotely
How to Prevent Costly Home Repairs | ServiceLive Blog
A pot smoking liberal arts PhD is... eh. Not news.

Right. Until some voted it up to #1 here.
> Linux's command line offers no benefits over OS X's.

Oh cmon. The rarely updated BSD tools versus GNU? Massive amounts of packaged command line software available at the click of a button? Commands available for more stuff, to automate admin tasks? A tabbed terminal out of the box?
"Hacking and painting have a lot in common. In fact, of all the different types of people I've known, hackers and painters are among the most alike."

Well, he certainly didn't refute the first sentence. Arguing that other things have a lot in common with hacking doesn't prove that painting doesn't. And I don't see how either you or he could say anything about the second. You don't know who I know. And I didn't even say they were the most alike of people I'd known, only among the most alike.

You both pretend I'd written "Hacking has more in common with painting than any other field." But if I'd meant that, I would have said it.

In fact, I say explicitly that what hackers have in common with painters is that they're both makers, and I mention other types of makers (writers and architects) who are also like hackers. The kinds of work I claim hacking is unlike are math and science, which I think is an important point, because lots of people have tried to push it into the mold of one or the other.

Now that's settled, will you answer my original question? Can you give me an example of a specific statement about painting that he's refuted? Not (what he claims is) the thesis of my essay, but one of the statements I make specifically about painting. As you point out, he attacks these "repeatedly and explicitly," with footnotes. I'm asking you to produce just one you feel is convincing,
to support your claim that he has "carefully refuted" me.

The reason I'm asking is because I think you'll find, when you look more closely, that you've been convinced by the form of his arguments (the emphatic tone, the citations) without actually understanding them. But go ahead, prove me wrong.
I agree. Small text ads, or even some banner ads (non animated please) all fine.
Big popup flash animated adverts with sound, not ok.
Beef Up Firebug in a Jiffy
ReiserFS, the file system with killer performance!
Sorry you thought it was spam Tichy, I thought it was interesting, glad you like my other stuff though ...

:(
The Mozilla organization doesn't properly package Firefox, nor do they link to packages for Linux OSs created by other people.

Since there's very little work involved in the latter, AFAICT this is because they suck.

In Ubuntu 8.04, FF3 is installed by default, but if you missed it, look for 'Firefox' in Add/Remove.
I still can't believe how ballmer is the head of microsoft, all he brings to the company is embarrassment and failure, not a single victory in a decade.

Any resemblance to our president is just a mere coincidence.
Can Techcrunch wait until something actually happens before writing about the same thing for the 14th time?
Arc gets I/O right
I still don't get how 'Get Info' on a file would be used to change the program it opens with.

And OS X software installs freaked the hell out of me the first time I tried (ran the app from the package dir, and it didn't work properly).
The post's author seems to be having a bad blogging ettique. He seemed to have edited his posts after receiving comments/feeback. And he has included the 'update' section in his post only after a reader noticed the editing and told him to do so.

@pmorici: agree with you

If G and Mozillia really wanted to get rid of the ad blocking software, they would have released a patch to somehow make the extentension unworkable.

Now for the question as to why Mozilla Firefox doesn't come with ad blocking extensions pre-installed, the answer is easy and straight. It is because Firefox base system has always been kept to the bare minimals else they could have included all the usually used plugins & extensions like Flash player, Real Player, Java Runtime Environment, etc

As for shipping with Google Toolbar, the author shouldn't be bothered about this fact since the are two versions: with google toolbar pre-installed and without google toolbar. And you can choose what you want.

Yahoo! too shipped IE7 with Yahoo Toolbar. IE as fas as I know uses MSN's "page not found" (I have IE6 on XP and haven't bothered to update it since I use Firefox)

And for using Google as the default search engine, all my non-tech friends know is "internet is google". The moment they need something... Go to firefox address bar and type google.com

Even though other search engines are beginning to have clutter free pages homepages like Google. Its Google that made its mark first with the both - good results and clutter free pages - and quickly won users(most of them now being loyal followers of any 'good' and necessary G product).
Cloud Computing: Virtualization Security on Steroids
Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Online Video (your mashup is probably legal)
Performance Comparison - C++ / Java / Python / Ruby/ Jython / JRuby / Groovy
Spartan Programming
Presentation: Contrasting java and dynamic languages.
This is ridiculous. Almost CLEARLY a case of mistaking cause and correlation. It seems almost obvious to me that the "good" golfers see the hole as larger because they perceive the game as easier. It's not that they are better because they perceive the hole to be larger.

The idea that they are working on research to enable you to see the hole as larger in an attempt to improve play is laughable.
I like this. It is non-trivial so it is good for like an interview question, but nor is it so difficult that one has to spend all day on it. Also the problem is general enough so one can use whatever language one wants. I used ANSI C to solve it myself, but one could really use nearly any language. Very cool.
Should Personal Genomics Be Regulated?
VMWare ousts founder
What are you talking about? This was news on NPR this morning. They've already expressed the new terms.
VMware fires CEO, hires Windows vet from EMC, stock dumps 30%
In theory, yes, however, the psychology of people makes it necessary to only place your bid within the last 10 seconds of the auction expiring. Otherwise the other bidders will get angry for being outbid and start bidding more than they originally wanted.

That is probably also the reason that ebay forbids sniper software: without snipers, people will bid higher, which is good for ebay (revenue == percentage of final price).
In case you're in the same boat as me:
http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/unix_open_source/lynxt...

I can't believe it took me this long to realize it's not included.
Why can't people just accept evidence?
The bullying by Ballmer and co, is
1.Throw the current board out bcos it didnt agree with MS. The current board can be thrown by MS by telling that there is a chance that they come back, so shareholders will vote for Carl.
2.Grab Yahoo for even cheaper as with Carl on board there is no other option for growth other than by selling.
Wait, winning a war is one of the triumphs of central planning? How many wars have been fought directly by non-governments? And isn't that like saying that one of the triumphs of dictatorships is how much life improved after Stalin and Hitler died?
Bullying is all about destroying and humiliating people. It is all about intimidating a crowd of people by making an example of someone.

Tactics effective in a monopoly are seldom as effective in an oligopoly.
Because there are very few software engineering degree programs. And between the computer science degrees and visual basic factories there's a wide gulf of nothingness where people who want to be good software engineers should be getting their training.

In other words, I'm very happy with my CS degree, but I learned almost all of my software engineering skills outside of the classroom.
Although I agree with the main thesis, I must point out something that muddles matters: if we hadn't had massively subsidized highways, cars would not have been so ubiquitous in postwar America.

I happen to think that this supports the libertarian side, since a government powerful enough to build something of that scope will be vulnerable to lobbyists who want it to build something useful to their industry.
Maybe I missed something, but it seemed to me to be just a file server, of which there are hundreds in the market?

I am sure you did not mean it is as spam, though - maybe the "flag" option is best left untouched :-/

Edit: unflagged
I guess what I don't really get is why Ulrich couldn't just post a simplified explanation for the code he checked in. As one commenter put it, to an outside observer Ulrich comes across as an arse.

Even if the technical explanation can't really be simplified effectively, then conveying the impetus for the change would probably have diffused the thread. He wasted more time ordering people to stop opening the bug than he would have spent explaining himself.
Power Awareness Quiz
Interesting concept. Certainly struck a nerve with me.

I've found one of the easiest ways to minimalize my code is to require less code.

How? Better program design. Tighter structure, more efficient algorithms to accomplish to same thing. Reverse the order of two functions and suddenly that conditional is no longer necessary. Adding a parameter to a function may make it larger, but useful in more places. Only handle 90% of cases and send the outliers off to custom-land. You get the idea.

It then becomes a whole lot easier to minimalize 50 LOC than 100 LOC.

[EDIT: The timing of this post couldn't have been better. I struggled with some pretty complex code all day yesterday. I woke up at 5 a.m. and thought, "Just switch the order the functions are called." I did and it simplified beautifully, working perfectly, and eliminating about 50 LOC.]
Computational Complexity of Games and Puzzles
"Since then, Yahoo has quite literally prostrated themselves before Microsoft to get a merger done, even perhaps at a price much lower than Microsoft’s original bid."

You know, I thought this was an error. But look!

"Pronunciation

IPA: /ˈlɪtəɹəli/, SAMPA: /"lIt@r@li/

1. In the direct, word for word sense. With neither idiom nor metaphor.

"When my sewing kit fell off of the barn loft, I literally had to look for a needle in a haystack."

2. In a non-direct, figurative sense. Not literally.

"When I saw that Michael Arrington, someone who writes for a living, use the word "literally" to mean "figuratively", my eyes literally exploded with figurative rage."

Also, in case anyone needs a memorable explanation of when not to say "literally", consider: http://www.craigslist.org/about/best/van/144733448.html
Looks like I have a lot of research to do.
I learned almost all of my software engineering skills outside of the classroom

Me too.

I have to believe that this is the norm, not the exception. No matter how much you learn in school, you're never completely ready. You'll probably pick up much, if not most, of what you really need to know on the job.
Three Ways to Stop Cell Phone Spam
Much like everything else, spamming has gone mobile. It used to be that you could expect your email inbox to be assaulted with unwanted messages. Now your phone can fall victim too. Even if you don't pay for text messaging, you can still receive unwanted solicitations.
Cain to ARP poison and sniff passwords
That epitomizes the problem. There's been so much noise from Techcrunch about MSFT and YHOO, it's very hard to decipher what's actually news/important.
"vi, emacs, or a rusty axe"

Redundant. M-x viper-mode; M-x rusty-axe-mode.
You're worth whatever someone will pay for you. If no one will buy you, you're worth discounted future cash flows.

Edit: I like volida's methodology better.
"Go to firefox address bar and type google.com"

That cracks me up, because I have told my wife about 1024 times that the little box to the right of the address bar will Google things for her!
Although, in their defense, what do you think most legitimate support emails from actual customers look like? This can't have been far off.

But still, their security process has a hole big enough to drive a truck through.
My knowledge of business at this level is incomplete. What would be the implications of replacing Yahoo's board of directors?
Man, that was a painful book to read. I winced through the whole thing.
The Apply button on the footer still goes to S2008 too :)
I bet that redacted portion of the email address is Karppinen
A real FPS game engine, made in flash
There are Silver Bullets, but only in terms of specific contexts. If you are dealing with heavy concurrency, a language like Erlang, Newsqueak, or Stackless Python is very powerful. If you are doing a lot with matrices, Matlab makes your job a whole lot easier. The problem is that interesting problems tend to combine a lot of different ingredients, so the problem reappears at a different level.

I find the following analogy interesting:

"I don't want to harvest vegetables, boil down some bone to make chicken stock, collect herbs & spices, throw it all in a pot and simmer for 4 hours - I'll just go to the store and buy some soup instead!"

Soup used to be a very good way of extracting additional nutritional value from kitchen scraps, as well as assuaging someone's hunger with relatively few resources. In the industrialized world, it is no longer needed for these purposes, yet the pattern persists. Is soup still near-optimal for something, or does it just persist because it's good enough to survive, though other patterns are clearly better.
Technically, a system call (on i386) is only changing CS, EIP, and ESP. You don't have to change CR3 or flush the TLB. "Swapping stacks" isn't expensive.
He mentions in the post that it was a name other than his own:

"Did it not occur to you at all that someone at "marko.[redacted]@yahoo.com" was not actually me? For example, because the names didn't match?"
From analog dollars to digital pennies: The crisis in traditional media
conciseizr.com -- new YCombinator winter entry. :-)
If it's true, it's far beyond unacceptable. If true, there is absolutely no way to secure an Apple ID.
I can see why PG is getting a little out of sorts. You're really missing the point. And so does the critic. Its not about deconstructing the simile to see if its valid. Who really cares if hackers are like painters? That's why the critic had a hard time finding a thesis statement, because he wasn't looking for the right thesis. The point was that writing code takes creativity and imagination. Its not just a rote exercise or an academic endeavor.
If the critic had wanted to refute pg's thesis, therefore, he would be trying to prove that hacking doesn't take imagination or creativity and that any joe who knows a programming language can create an amazing site/app.
Instead, the critic concentrated on a simile used to explain the thesis, which can easily be substituted for another simile, as the critic pointed out. Substituting a more appropriate simile, however, does not refute the point of the essay. Essentially, all the critic ended up saying was that in his opinion, PG used a bad simile. The point of PG's essay remains valid: it takes creativity and imagination to be a good hacker, and its wrong to characterize the profession as something that lacks that creativity.
Repl that.
Isn't this a fanciful expression to label DRY programming?
Hmm... It's amusing to me that spartan programming has a name like this. To me, it's simply about efficiently using resources. I am reminded of the time I asked Miguel de Icaza about design patterns. He said he never saw the point of having them in a book because people would just invent them when they needed them.
Two problems here.

The most fundamental problem is that we are talking (in this instance) about belief systems. People seem programmed to reject even positive evidence that conflicts with their belief systems - just as they ignore the complete absence of evidence supporting things like religious faiths, fairies at the bottom of the garden etc.

The second problem is that very few of us are taught how to assess evidence. Most lack the skills required to judge the relevance and likely accuracy of what is presented. Evidence (I know) to support this hypothesis can be gleaned from almost any daily newspaper - most items are written by intelligent human beings but the results lack any analysis that reflects an ability to process evidence properly.
For what it's worth, I thought the article was pretty informative. It turns out that lawyers can pay a lot for this particular kind of case because asbestos is about the only cause of that kind of cancer. The lawyer just gets a settlement with parties rather than litigating for years.
Sounds quite a bit like what Rob Pike has to say about programming style:

http://www.lysator.liu.se/c/pikestyle.html
I think that slowly facebook's value will drop as they continue to rely on their high valuation without making significant revenue.
I loved it. Was it painful because you didn't enjoy the writing, or because of the murder aspect?
>The old adage (not mine) is that 99% of the time operating system bugs are actually bugs in your program, and the other 1% of the time they are still bugs in your program, so look harder, dammit.

I agree in general, but... I have run into a few platform bugs in my time. For example, at one point realloc in the standard C library that came with Visual Studio would break if you (IIRC) allocated a bunch of blocks that were over 16k, and realloced them to be smaller than 16k. And I had to figure that out the hard way, because the bug was making our code crash.

Also, on most game consoles, I'd say about a quarter of the time you think something is a platform bug, it really is. Seriously. Compiler bugs and SDK bugs just aren't all that uncommon there.
When I started school, they told us that 4 years of busting your ass in engineering will do nothing but prepare you to start learning when you get a job. Back in 1st year, I thought they were just trying to scare us noobs, but only after a few years did I realize how right they were. There is such a dizzlingly wide array of things to learn, you can't do much except learn the basics.

As if learning the basics of your field isn't time consuming enough, companies now want universities to do their job on top of this as well. Sorry, but that's a bit like demanding that someone teach wisdom - it just ain't gonna happen.

This is just companies whining and looking for ways to offload costs. The missing skills they're complaining about can be developed very quickly (6 months to a year) by any competent grad that's put in a challenging-enough position. The problem is, such positions are a bit hard to find - when the days of paternalistic companies went away, so did the idea of hiring, training and investing in new grads, and too many of the internships and coops that are out there now are just cheap crap work.
No, the board should be thrown out because it acted against the wishes of the shareholders. And in a public company the shareholders are king. Ballmer has nothing to do with this. Carl is in it for the money - so he probably wants to chop the company up.
Five Ways to Stop Framework Fixation from Crashing Your Scaling Strategy
I see your point, Paul. But if all you're saying is that hackers are like "makers", your essay is really boring. There is nothing special about being a "maker". And because you've applied no rigor to defining the term, you haven't even set up a comparison: you can substitute "mathematician" as easily as "painter" or "bicycle builder".

Meanwhile, your critic has provided several examples of ways hackers are specifically unlike painters. For instance, you felt painters needed to know about paint chemistry, like hackers need to know about big-O notation. No, your critic says, most painters don't know anything about paint chemistry, just "fat over lean". Painters, the critic very credibly notes, also get laid more than hackers.

I've answered your original question several times over now. You seized on the word "refute" and demanded that I provide a specific statement that the critique refutes. I caved and said, "ok, you said hackers are more like painters than most other people you know". You've now backed off that statement, which I still read as the core of your argument. You've now mooted the argument. I'm fine with that.

I agree, the critique is stylish and fun to read, and more convincing for it. Maybe that's not fair. But your essay got more attention, so I wouldn't worry.
But the corporate manager will say: if everyone writes their own syntax, my programmers can't read each other's code.

I know it's a deliberate straw man, but still: the corporate manager who says this doesn't understand what "his"/"her" programmers actually do.
I have been waiting for yahoo to do this for a long time. It makes me wonder why yahoo and microsoft cannot come up with cool (yet obvious) things like this first.

Does anyone know if this is something the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) could make a part of the internet authentication standard?
Print-Friendly Images and Logos with CSS
It's a thousand clock cycles more than a function call (seriously, I'm not making this up: time it sometime). I guess whether that is "expensive" or not is context dependent. For some applications (e.g. database servers) that make lots of random access reads from large files, using a mapping can be overwhelmingly faster.

I guess I'm stunned that this turns out to have been such a controversial notion...
Why people can't accept evidence? What do you know as "truth"? Just look at the title of the article: "Acupuncture 'no help for IVF'"

See the single quotes around the key statement? Even the reporter does not want to endorse the truthfulness of the statement. Wise choice, since the content of the article states something that is, at least up to a point, opinion.

Rather your question should be: "Why do some people, like myself, so readily accept incomplete facts as absolute truths?" Take heed and listen to bdfh42's comments about assessing evidence. He is right on the money, no need for me to repeat what he stated.
Nice reference. Thanks.

I don't expect you to agree with all of them...

I don't.

Even index variable names should be meaningful. Just drop down a couple of nested levels, use "i" again, forget to make it local, and see how much fun you'll have.

But I love the disclaimer at the beginning. Made me feel a whole lot better, no matter what he said. I'll have to remember that one.
The new FISA compromise: it's worse than you think
Sonar enters the third dimension
If I remember correctly (and I probably don't), the C function support is a bit iffy.