skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is a position that I've mellowed on, over the years. I've been working on almost nothing but Open Source software for over ten years now, and I prefer Open Source solutions when such exists (and I find a very large majority of proprietary software distasteful...stuff like Mac OS X, Windows, etc.), but if there's clearly a solution to a problem I'm having, I'll buy it without hesitation.

The annoying thing, to me, isn't that it's not Open Source...it is that most proprietary software is of exceedingly poor quality...and so I find myself regretting it quite often.

For example, there are no Open Source Blu-Ray players, and so my options are three or four simply horrible proprietary products. The best of them is bad, and the worst is intolerable.

But, as an Open Source and proprietary software developer, I'm perfectly happy with our Open Source users never buying our proprietary products--if they're contributing on the mailing lists or sending in a patch or a good bug report now and then, they are paying their way.
I love it. But I only have, like, two tests, so it's not very useful.

Honestly, I've only recently started writing tests, and so it doesn't impact my code very much, but it's awesome for being able to know that a function change is doing what I think it's doing. Just tonight I added a new regex to a function that generates a "safe" string for using as an ID for DOM elements, and being able to test it from the command line--and see just the relevant output--rather than reloading the page several times and search for the converted string, saved me several minutes.

I'm a fan. Just need to add more tests.
The Pros And Cons Of LifeLock
Microsoft's Own Social Network Under Development
Sure, but my original point was that they don't seem to want to grow. They don't seem to want to be a chain of lemonade stands, they just want to be their own profitable lemonade stand. Which is great and fine, but it's perhaps not aligned with many of our aims.
Red Ring of Death cost Microsoft $1 Billion
Healing Microsoft Windows
I find that by building a test, I get to know what the code is doing and why better than any other way. It's a great learning experience.

Also, while thinking and building about a test, I think of simplifications and new features to add. Why? It's because technically, a test actually uses the code. If you and your code are friends, prepare to become lovers.
I've been using the beta for a few weeks on my XO lappy. It actually runs pretty nicely there...but Dragonfly is not as easy to use as Firebug. I get confused a lot (not just when trying to use Opera, but it's safe to say that it is more frequent while trying to use Dragonfly). But Opera seems to be cursed with a "too much" UI. Too many buttons, too many options, too much crud around the content.

Nonetheless, it works much faster on the XO than Firefox...it, unfortunately, doesn't handle scaling well at all, though, so the text is either way too small or way too big.
More proof that global variables are bad.
By SharePoint I'm assuming you mean Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007

I had a client last year that was looking into it, so I did a lot of research and playing around for them. I probably read about eight books on it. In addition, I wrote a small application that automates the hooking up of Sharepoint into other Enterprise datastores (like web services or DB2 databases) I also am using at my one of my large clients. I know a little about it.

Yes, it's a beast, but large-app software is like that, so everybody stop complaining. It also has fine-grained security, so that comment was off-base. I think the learning curve is too steep for Joe Blow the startup guy to use to it's maximum effectiveness. On the other hand, it does enough out of the box to make it an interesting option for small teams. The shared calendaring in Outlook and shared list management in Access make it attractive. Add in offline access with Groove, and learning just a few features can give a team a lot of power.

To really understand MOSS you have to realize that it is the future of Microsoft's platform: shove everything out onto the web, then write workflow and security and forms management and office integration into it. Office becomes more of a gateway to use SharePoint than a stand-alone product.

I know the first time I saw the workflow engine work _inside_ of Office docs I thought that was a pretty cool integration. Likewise, endusers being able to create their own web pages with live data from other systems? Neat. I can see a natural progression for a startup to begin with Groove, then graduate to MOSS once things start cooking. It would certainly be better than using a dozen other free apps that all do not interoperate -- as long as you don't eat up precious time fooling around with it. The whole point is to leverage the parts that work together naturally, not become a MOSS expert.

But the look of the thing? Butt-ugly. No getting around that. The UI is so bad it's hard to convince people that there is as much going on under the hood as there is.

In short, I'm not crazy about it, but the more I think about it, the more value I can see it bringing a small team.
Go LibraryThing! I used to work there and Tim is, indeed, a very inspiring person.
Will We Let Google Makes Us Smarter?
happy fathers day everyone ... remember you can always do something special like sending an e-card like this one :-)

http://fb-ec2.happywishes.net/images/fathersday/png/

Thats all it takes and you can't beat the price ;-)
Who’s Afraid Of The Big, Bad, Google?
Oh and almost forgot... I'm using Apture for all the cool context links. I was really impressed. Check them out at: http://www.apture.com/
Announcing Google App Engine Book
How does puppy killing have anything to do with making something people want?
Yes, Apture kinda blew my mind. Unfortunately wordpress.com doesn't support them yet, and it's a major pain to migrate.
Misleading article.

To say sychronizing files from your PDA to your Ford is the same as sharing folders on the web? That's a bit of a stretch.

Could there be some kind of uber- sharing-synchronization program? Beats me. Seems like there are a lot of market segments and problems. Why would we want one, big, bulky product that does a gazillion different types of synchronization?

You see, Microsoft gets it both ways. They write the product that does everything, people bitch about enterprise apps. If they write a dozen niche products that are somewhat similar, people bitch about duplication.

For me? I'm a big Groove fan, even if they did cut the crap out of the features to make it less competitive with their other stuff.
Skydeck: Will It Be The First Billion Dollar Social Graph Company?
Hm, I still remember how it was when I tried to understand iteration and recursion.

Of course I understood the concept of doing something x times with increasing counter, but I couldn't see the clear relation between what I wrote and what it did. It seemed a bit magic and I wanted to "truly understand" it before mapping the concept to syntax. It seemed too arbitrary to me to rely in my thinking on such magic.

My strategy was to unloop every loop I saw. It was ridiculous, I didn't have enough resources to keep even smaller loops in mind and I quickly forgot them. After few days I just gave up and committed it to my memory. Only then I felt that I truly understand.

I think I tried programming skipping this step but I just got irritated and really unsure if what I'm doing makes any sense. I remember it being the same with recursion, except a bit more mind-boggling. Now every time I try to understand something similar I try to reduce it to simplest case and just commit it.

I suppose other people may be unaware of what is actually keeping them from understanding and never get that far.
EveryBlock's funding was from a journalism grant, and rather than have some of the destructive conditions that VC money has, it had a condition that the code they produce must be publicly available at the end of the grant.

While I'm name dropping, Threadless is another Chicago company.
There is a quote like this in the Feynman Lectures. It's nice for faculty to believe: takes the pressure off of us to teach. You're either born with it, or go away.

In physics, now, we know better. We can teach it. I'm sure they'll figure it out in programming, too.
Google CEO on Microsoft rivalry, Yahoo talks
So, you throw away previous versions without knowing that your new code actually works with your existing integration points?

Ba bow.
Using http://www.younoodle.com in early 2008 was as exciting as any site I used in years, simply because it was clean, functional, fast, responsive and most importantly allowed me to connect with people I was interested in and led to several meetups.

Web communities are great and all that, but as I get older (sound like an old man even though I am a twenty-something) I actually want to meet people, network, and have deeper more meaningful engagements (...ok ...real-world fun & parties ;) ).
Git resources from 37signals
For me, ironically, as it grows it is also starting to lose its lustre through mass adoption leading to lower quality and fewer connections... connectivity activity diluted? new joiners not so interested in engaging as observing? new joiners just joining because everyone else in their school/college is (...and YouNoodle just want mass membership)?

Hence the fact I am getting bored of it but that, however, seems to be true with most sites after the new-and-shiny phase passes.
Gen Yers lack confidence, behave like idiots
... the moderately successful perhaps are the software engineers, those who can program but can’t imagine that they will ever enjoy it, and are content to submit to management discipline and to be drowned in UML (ugh!).

At least I know I'm not alone in thinking that best programmers are those who simply love what they are doing. However sentimental this may sound, there's nothing else that distinguishes outstanding engineers from good ones; there's nothing else that can predict the most important career dilemma in every programmer's life: to be a coder forever or to abandon coding for management and... UML.

And thanks for the post, enjoyed reading it very much.
I think it's interesting but, like others mentioned, a bit overkill for a small startup.

If anyone is interested in SharePoint online training, check out http://www.learnsharepoint.com/. It's one of our sites.
Social Networks: A Fertile Ground For Spamming 
According to a new research by messaging security firm Cloudmark,
"Four out of five social network users have received unwanted 'friend' invitations, messages or postings over the past year."
Don't disrespect your user. Code native.

What? Every VM worth its salt compiles the bytecode to something just as good as optimized C at runtime (it's called "JIT"). The JVM does this, Parrot does this, and even SBCL does this (even code you type into the REPL!).

So basically, there is no performance reason to avoid VMs. If you're wondering why languages like Java and Lisp run slower than C on average, though, it's because the constructs are different. C is assembly; everything you write is basically a CPU instruction. CPU instructions run really fast. Things like memory management, cons cells, OO system MRO lookups, etc. don't run all that fast.

So basically, you pay for expensive language features; you don't pay to be running on a VM.

Finally, is it more disrespectful to provide a neat tool that burns battery, or to not provide the tool at all?
It is the jack of all trades and the master of none, with one exception. It works very well with ActiveDirectory. Other than that, it will do a mediocre job at being anything you can dream up: CMS, blog platform, wiki, customer portal, intranet.

And keep in mind that, in many of those capacities, the tool will live or die by how effectively it's organized and used and not really on its own technical merit. The best thing you can do is write down what you want to accomplish and find something that makes it as hard as possible to not accomplish that. MOSS, in my opinion, puts up more barriers than it takes down because to the end user it's not very intuitive, has issues with Firefox, etc.
Turn on the goddamn iPhone video Steve
Transcript of an interview with Berners-Lee on Semantic web and why now it's the time
Six Months Later, Three Start-Ups Find Their Goals Are Elusive
Yep, I think the step of writing everything out without loops, coming to the realisation that you're duplicating a ton of code, and figuring out loops, is a crucial one. I only vaguely remember taking it when I was about 10, but I'm pretty sure I did exactly the same thing as you.

I had a similar transition of just writing all my code in one big block for a while, versus factoring stuff out into functions. And then putting stuff into data structures rather than primitive variables and arrays. Then, fully understanding the stack. And pointers.

Oddly enough I never had any trouble with recursion, although I have to say I probably encountered it somewhat later than iteration, at which point I was already very comfortable with the basics. (I only had access to very basic programming books and tools early on - internet? forget it) I guess I had the freedom of having no direction whatsoever and learning this stuff really slowly, something you don't have when taking a course at university. The optimal path is somewhere in between, for sure. I've done a fair bit of un-learning.

I wonder if this is harder today - the temptation of copy & paste coding is there. I've never been especially fast at typing, so typing more than a couple of lines from a book was probably harder than figuring out how the code in the book worked and how to adapt it without much trial and error. Cue comment from someone who learned to program with punch cards. (or twiddling switches...in the freezing cold...at the top of a mountain)
Ask YC: Automated Personalized Video Production?
Recently I was visiting an amusement park with my daughter, 8. She had her first roller-coaster ride, which, as you can imagine, was quite traumatic for her.

As we got off the ride, there was a stand that offered to sell us customized videos of her experience. For twenty bucks, the computer pre-mixed some stock footage, rock-n-roll, and recorded video from the event. As it turns out, each car had little web cameras in them.

You can see the result here: http://www.whattofix.com/blog/archives/2008/06/you_gotta_see_t.php

At first I thought the whole thing was a ripoff, but the more I think about it, the more the value proposition makes sense. Here we are storing quasi-important memories in a professional format that I couldn't easily do, and it's all turn-key.

My question is: I wonder if there is room for a lot of automated video production like this? Amusement part rides are an obvious one, but couldn't you do other ones? Like some kind of hand-carried system for birthdays, weddings, etc. You could have simple instructions of what to shoot and for how long, and the computer would mix in all of the bells-and-whistles. Or you could do my-first-small-airplane ride. Or heck -- how about recording videos of kids as they play exciting parts of their video games with each other?

This seems like an interesting problem from the expert-systems realm (how much of a video mix expert can I put into a camcorder) and a delivery standpoint (are all solutions like this pre-wired, where the video is pre-programmed and the sale happens immediately after the ride, like the amusement park?) Or are there other models available?

Seems like there is room for entrepreneurial growth in this idea. I was wondering what the community thought of it.
An avid Apple and open source fan. I've recently come to see how much of a contradiction that can be.

That said, I don't think an open-sourced version of Microsoft's enterprise intranet newsfeed network thingy would be terribly exciting. I would suspect that it would be highly specific to the structure of their intranet and would be tightly coupled with AD and MOSS. Likewise, I'm sure it needs to scale but being a closed community means that it doesn't need to scale that much compared to something like Facebook.

Profiles. Friends. Those are probably the easy part. I suspect if you wanted to use a non-AD system, have an open web standards-based product and increase the scale or build on top of an existing open source intranet platform then you would get more mileage from ground zero.
The Future of Digg [video] - On partnership with Microsoft, acquisition rumors, top Diggers etc.
What do you think about the set-car! thing? Why not just use Erlang instead?
Taking down FUD can be fun. I'm surprised this kind of open source bashing still exists. However, it would really help if the author didn't resort to cringeworthy ad hominem attacks every couple paragraphs - there are plenty of real arguments in there, no need to dilute them!
I have been using Behavior driven development (BDD):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavior_driven_development
This has made unit testing more intuitive (and fun) for me. Specifically, I have been using RSpec, http://rspec.info/ , which is an excellent BDD framework for Ruby. I am not a purist who first writes the tests(behavior's) before writing the actual code. However, my experience has been that it is important to eventually have thorough unit tests for your code to ensure that your application is more robust. It allows you to add new features with greater confidence.
How To Set Up A Loadbalanced High-Availability Apache Cluster Based On Ubuntu 8.04 LTS
MySQL Queries Optimization [video]
Adapting Websites to Users: MIT Technology Review
I also like test driven development.

6 reasons to develop your tests first: http://www.lispcast.com/drupal/node/6
Is the iPod Touch the New XP?
I agree - the top 3 stories on HN are the worst top 3 I've seen yet.
Ask HN: how to make things easier to fix?
Am I the only one with the feeling that things are not as "fluid" as they should be? Taking software (including web apps) for starters, why is it so hard to mend it to our personal needs?

As an example, I would like to have column in Thunderbird that deletes a mail, analogous to the "mark as spam" column.

Now I can program, so I could presumably dive into the Thunderbird source code and fix it... But it is too much effort for such a small thing. So while Open Source should in principle allow people to fix things, it is still too difficult for the most part.

Is there any hope ever to make such things easier? I know "programming for noobs" has been claimed by several projects, but I don't think it has ever been achieved? Even Yahoo! Pipes was too complicated for my tastes, and I haven't heard much about it anymore, either. In principle Mashups seem like potential candidate for finally fulfilling user dreams. Greasemonkey is a good candidate for web apps, but again, it is much too hard to program for noobs.

The only thing that came to mind thinking about it today was Excel - a lot of people who would never call themselves programmers seem to have achieved an impressive degree of Excel mastery. Is it because Excel is simple enough, or because it is enough of a standard (more people invest in Excel skills than in Thunderbird skills)?

Anyway, just wondering what are your thoughts about this problem (hope I made it clear enough)?
I've always had the thought that first time students should just be given a REPL and follow along line by line with the instructor. Assignment would be so obvious if one could just type the variable and have it spit out the value. Teach good debugging first and kids will be able to teach themselves the rest is what I say.
Competition is good and well; because Firefox hasn't been enthusiastic about it lately (cf. Acid 3), this could be a welcome change.

Not crazy about the UX elements (the touch-"throw" gesture to return to the main menu, for one), but it's, of course, a prototype.
http://getsatisfaction.com

Because, I can get to learn what people like, dislike, want, need, cry for. It is Feedback 2.0

I am currently subscribed for few feeds for some products on my domain. Very informative.
MIT's OpenCourseWare extends reach to High School Students
A new set of resources for AP classes was added 6 months ago and has had over a quarter of a million visitors since then...
I found a few thread leaks in my work's java suite. Unfortunately it was due to the fact that our thread monitor (good thing we put it in) started spazing out. I asked "why so many threads", and found the answer "because we created daemon threads and lost reference to them, there was nothing to stop any of them, so they kept getting created, and re-created, etc, and they all kept running for the entire suite."

Now if I could figure out why rebuilding the database takes 7 minutes vs 20 seconds that it used to take i'd start really saving time during dev.
Ha ha I guess you're right! Test Driven development right? I'll try to make some time for it.
Here's a thought: you tell it your budget, who you want to send stuff to, some categories they're likely to be interested in, and what dates/holidays. It nags you x days beforehand to pick a gift from the ones it's selected. If you don't it sends the highest ranked one within your budget. It would be cool if xmas/birthday cards could be semiautomated too.
Creating a Standard for Tagging & The Semantic Web
Ensure - Ensure relevant Javascript and HTML are loaded before using them
Opera doesn't handle scaling well? How are you trying to scale things?

Opera supports zoom from 20-900 percent in reasonably small increments, including 80, 90, 110 and 120 percent. I've never had this scaling problem (though granted I haven't run it in your environment) -- when a site's text is too small I can simply hit "+" a few times, and problem solved.
PG, where can i exchange my karma points for real karma?
Different sort of free Wi-Fi starts to thrive
Following up on my own question, some thoughts:

- in Star Trek, everybody could fix software. I could just say "Computer, add a 'delete' column to the mail folder view". So if hard AI is possible (which I believe), the problem is solvable. Are "simpler programming languages" all it takes?

- I think "graphical programming" doesn't work, or am I wrong (this used to be the common approach, "Visual whatever++")?

- Is it also attitude of the programs? For example Thunderbird could ship with a small IDE that allows me to immediately dive into the code.

- Maybe web applications should allow users to save customized JavaScript, like an inbuilt Greasemonkey-Feature
RE: UI, you can remove mostly anything. Opera GUI is probably THE most customizable that I have seen. And it's a kb shortcut demon...
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Gaming Forum Which Focuses On The Popular Consoles
Oh cool, another one of those 'them darn yunguns ain't made right' articles!

“Because this generation has been so coddled,” says Michael Wilder, pointing to Yers’ ever-present boomer parents, “when they do have to make a decision on their own, they’re looking for affirmation. They have no basic experience to allow them to be confident about the decisions they’re making.”

Heh, so you mean we're babies because our parents weren't drunks that beat us every night? Come and see my family, we are all emotionally isolated and not even remotely touchy-feely.

It's really nothing new. Just some dude writing an article about how he hates herd mentality.

Oh, and a handy counterpoint from the same magazine. Maybe those old fogeys can't believe in a world where the company is expected to screw you over and a steady job means a life of missed opportunities:
http://thegig.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2008/05/30/job-hopping-g...
A new baby (especially the first) is an interesting combination of 1. dang I have no time, and 2. I best get working so I can afford to but this little one through school!

Three weeks old today. Wowzers.
Top 10 Russian Web Sites
I would hope that apple has some control over plan price increases. It would be very bad for apple if the carriers they wed themselves too start behaving "badly".
Previous, less favourable coverage:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=143874