skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
When I found myself reading sentences like this

Citation itself often presents as a modality,
with an associated degree of confidence.

I started to wonder if this article was a practical joke. Why was someone writing about programming using the pompous language of literary theory? Was someone trying to pull a Sokal? Then I saw the endnote.

(I realize this is only DH2, but it's such an extreme case that I can't help thinking how lucky we are not to have programming ordinarily discussed in this way.)
Good idea, but it seems you already got some trolls..
Considering this is coming from the University of Glasgow, I wonder what sort of cool stuff they might be doing with this technology with Haskell/GHC.
That’s, by the way, a lame excuse of the kids. They do have the ability to pay. Gift cards for iTunes are available everywhere and if you have one you do not need a credit card to set up an account. I think even kids will be able to afford a 15€ card once which gives them an account. (I might be wrong about this but I think there are even ways of getting an account without a gift card or credit card. I’m not sure about that, though.)

I’m not a kid but I don’t have or want a credit card and I’m always too lazy to set up the alternate payment method available in Germany so I just use gift cards. (They have the added bonus that various electronic retailers will discount them by ten, twenty or even fifty percent every year or so. I have my Google Alerts set up. I’m consequently not paying as much as I would with a credit card.)
CSS Shadow Experiments: Some Fun with CSS Shadows
That's really good. You obviously know both how to make and sell a product!

Two people in one... just like your HN accounts.
You're missing the point: I didn't set out to refute the claim of 10x. I set out to refute that the claim had been proven.

> If you're going to refute McConnell or even Peopleware, you've got to do a study.

What McConnell has published isn't empirical, or scientific; argument suffices to refute it.

That goes for DeMarco and Lister, too - Peopleware was a popular book, not an empirical study aiming at establishing scientific fact.
At one point I thought they were going somewhere with Xbox live on WP7 and then move that strategy to a tablet. It could be a huge platform if there was a gaming phone/tablet linked with the titles on your xbox.

But of course they shot themselves in the foot a couple months back when they crippled indie game developers.
Croatian Ning variant Shoutem pivots into an app-development-on-demand service
Apple is _SO_ overprice.... err wait, what?

Seriously though. ASUS thinks they're going to sell an iPad competitor with an OS with lackluster touch technology for twice the cost, and less than half the battery life?
I'm guessing the ARM development focus started around the time smartbooks[1] were the Next Big Thing. Smartbooks have a form factor closer to netbooks than smartphones, so it would make sense for MS to try squeezing proper Windows onto them. Now that the iPad has stolen that market segment, MS has re-purposed the already-started ARM port for tablets.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smartbook
Thank you for the feedback. The colors look fine to me (in all the browsers I've tried). What OS & browser are you using?
I'm not sure what you mean by "strifes"; stripes perhaps? Why would making the colored stripes the same height be better? Have I misunderstood?
OS has nothing to do with what ISP can block. The only thing someone maybe able to do is run all their connections through a proxy or private vpn.
But that's a decision on the part of the person doing the underwriting, right? You're describing psychological factors that have nothing to do with the cost of doing the underwriting.

Are you saying SOX tripled the cost? 10X?

If not for SOX, are you suggesting that pets.com would have a successful IPO today?
>You might want to enable JavaScript or get a modern browser.

Javascript enabled and browser is "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.0.12) Gecko/2009070811 Red Hat/3.0.12-1.el5_3 Firefox/3.0.12" so I should be fine.

Error Console does report an interesting little tidbit;

Error: color is undefined
Source File: http://mothereffinghsl.com/js/script.js
Line: 89

The function in question is

function inputchange(e){

var target = e.target;

if (target.id == 'alpha'){
alpha = Math.floor(target.value)/100;
if (alpha === 1){
alpha = undefined;
}
}
if (target.id == 'light'){
var split = color.split('%');
split[1] = split[1].replace(/\d+/, Math.round(target.value));
color = split.join('%');

}
setText();

}

Sorry I dont have a full stack trace for you, nor am I inclined to fire up a debugger right now to troubleshoot this any further.

...

page is still stuck at "One sec, bro."
What StarCraft Can Teach You about Being Productive: The Mental Checklist
Sure, which leads one to thinking about it like auto racing.

You don't win a race by "driving fast", you win a race by never driving slowly. It doesn't matter how fast your car is if you spend 30% of your time stacked up at intersections.

Similarly, programmers spent a lot of time dealing with various barriers to productivity. (For instance, bugs you can't fix) If you want to increase your productivity, you need to attack these barriers by every means necessary.
Do you mean the cropped edges? Populous 2 looked similar.
He's not refuting "X", he's refuting the claim that "studies have shown X". To do that you don't need to run your own studies and show different results from X — in fact "X" might even be true. But if the existing studies don't exist, or can be shown to be flawed, then it's perfectly valid to simply point out the holes.

Your debugging criticism is somewhat valid, but the context here in that the original Sackman paper was mostly testing the difference between "online" and "offline" programming (i.e. programming whilst sitting at a computer or not — nothing to do with the internet!): see, for example, http://dustyvolumes.com/archives/497 and http://dustyvolumes.com/archives/500

The research was on whether debugging whilst sitting at a computer would make you more lazy, which is an interesting experiment for its time, but isn't really that connected to the modern concepts of debugging vs programming.
I've had the same experience with Steam.

I don't think I purchased a single PC video game since I discovered torrents and usenet (unless I needed a multiplayer key).

But recently I've been buying games on steam for the pure convenience of having a nice store with trailers, one click purchases and quick downloads.

Compared to having to deal with shady torrent sites, torrent download speed shaping from my ISP and cracks.
If you have a Windows 7 tablet then presumably you can install whatever you want, execute arbitrary code, etc. That's what I mean by powerful.
I wouldn't start with a data set. I would start by stating clearly enough the question we are looking for an answer to.

Doing that might involve getting clear on the terms. "Productivity" is too abstract and ambiguous to be used as-is, so we first need to say "here is what we are going to measure".
http://www.letscrate.com/
Heck, even one given programmer can see his own productivity varying wildly. There are times I could hack away thousands of lines of working code in a single week, and some other times I'd tinker for months getting no actual job done. Overall I managed to ship from time to time, though I blankly admit I failed the most ambitious projects because I was probably not up to the task.

Even programming at my very basic ability level (actually I never considered myself to be a professional programmer * ) I've seen a number of people who simply never get anything done, and are 10x less productive than I am. The sort of people who are the heroes of thedailywtf.

They never do any better than tinkering around; with some luck they may actually implement some simple code if given very precise requirements because they miss the basic impetus, or the necessary comprehension to start by themselves. Maybe in some huge java drones team, they may add some value, I don't know for sure, I've never worked in a team of more than five programmers anyway.

OTOH I've worked with some guys, thumping the keyboard 16 hours a day for months straight, getting working production code out of the frigging door every single day. So I dare saying I've seen it all : the 10x programmer, the 1x programmer (myself and most others), and the 0.1x programmer (I don't know how many).

All of this sure isn't scientific fact, but simply what I witnessed myself in the past 25 years. It's enough information to guide me through :)

* I'm a professional dilettante :)
But most mac apps are created by indie shops.

Are there ever any "Blockbuster" mac app releases?

You rarely see marketing for mac apps. Most of the big names (ex photoshop, word) are so established that they don't need to bother worrying about price (or possibly even using the app store). But still thats a small percentage of the market.
"8-figure revenue"

Which Facebook has. So why arent they public? Obviously not the monetary cost of SOX. It could be one of the toher parts of SOX (such as the regulations on public company execs) but I find it hard to believe the cost of the accounting department is the reason Facebook isn't public. There are thousands of companies smaller than Facebook being traded every day and they're not going backrupt because of the accounting costs.

Even without SOX, there were a lot of reasons to remain private. On the margins some companies remain private because of SOX costs. (If SOX is preventing useless companies with 0 revenue from going public I see that as a feature and not a bug). But on the scale of Facebook, the costs are not important. So there are other reasons driving this, not SOX.
http://longreads.com/ + http://www.instapaper.com
In general, you can not actually fix bugs by encrusting more code onto your system. At some point the buggy code has to come out. It is not true to say governments never cancel laws, but they sure don't do it anywhere near often enough.

This isn't really free market vs. regulation, a debate I think cuts in the entirely wrong direction anyhow, it's simply a system engineering question. Complexity begets more complexity. Simple solutions to real world problems actually beget complexity too, but less so. People in general need to be able to ascertain whether a given action they may take is legal or not in advance of being hauled into court and having a judge decide, and complex laws remove that. Legal complexity eventually becomes its own tyranny all by itself.

(And if you do want to play "free market vs. regulation", I would challenge you with: "exploiting the already existing bugs in the market system." or "exploiting the already existing bugs in the regulation of the market system"?)
They are developing some sort of Windows 7 specifically for tablets. It's called Windows 8.
None of those things guarantee a good hire or a good developer, and their absence doesn't indicate a bad hire or a bad developer. But ... it's something for companies to go off of that wasn't created just for the interview.

To flip it around to the companies, how useless would this job posting: "Internet company in North America looking for developers. We have fewer than 1 million employees and all employees get indoor working space." That accurately describes Groupon, Facebook, Dropbox, and Joe's Waffle and Website Sweatshop.

Things like blogs, twitter, etc are signals and they're useful for people that need to make decisions based on limited information.
But using introductory programming courses as an example of writing real-world code would be a huge mistake. Most of those assignments in my day were almost trivially easy for someone that actually understands the material (and almost impossible by those who don't). It would not be a fair assessment of software engineering productivity.
I find it disconcerting that your appeal-to-emotion rebuttel addressing the walled garden premise has garnered so many up votes. The second paragraph is nothing more than an insult to the ideology opposite yours.
Great, Microsoft built the Lexus LFA [1] of Tablets. Pseudo-sleek, super expensive and no one knows or gives a damn about it.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexus_LFA
Anybody knows when and where is the next Startup School?
But they could also make it immensely harder to do so, look at prism 54, which require binary blobs to work right, and even then have random failures, or the ralink stuff. It is nowhere near as good as the Atheros stuff.
Does anyone know which browsers have hardware graphics acceleration for WebGL? Does it work on iPhone/Android, or only desktop browsers?
> As fun as, say, Angry Birds is, it doesn't compare to, say, Worms 2.

Except for me Worms is currently £1.79 for the iPhone. Worms 2 is £2.99. I get what you're trying to say, but this Christmas EA had their games on sale for 59p (about 99c I think) and they were mostly good games too. The Mac game market is nowhere near as mainstream as PC and Consoles, and there's a risk that mainstream developers may choose not to port games if they're competing with £2.99 games with equivalent quality to Worms 2 or Fifa 11 on the iPhone (in terms of use of native platform).
I agree with your first sentence. But the programmers enjoy it so much the expense is justified!
This is super not intuitive, and there's no way that I can see to revert back to the original state.
I guess you'll have to take my word for it that I'm not talking about the obviously silly ways of making developers accountable (like LOC or tickets closed.) I'm a developer, so I know that typically managers who don't know how to code shouldn't be managing coders.

What I'm talking about is developers who demand above market wages, and shorter hours (than lawyers, or doctors, or automotive engineers etc.) and less commitment, and more equity. There are a lot of these guys out there, and a lot of people on here who think like that. I'm saying that's a childish, entitled attitude that ignores the reality of starting and building a company. Sometimes you can't have it all.
I'd offer to cook up some honest-to-goodness Italian pasta (with something like pesto, amatriciana or ragu` alla bolognese) just to be able to hang out at one of those events, if I were ever in the area.
Map Every Bit - Mapping your social network across Twitter and Facebook
Only if Tutorial D became much more viable while I wasn't looking.
Which part of the above did you have trouble with?

"Citation" is the topic being discussed. It's a technical term that refers to how scientific papers refer to other scientific papers.

"Modality" is the concept I've been introducing for three paragraphs. You're supposed to know what it means by then, or I've not been clear enough.

"Present as" is an intransitive verb phrase. I could say the same thing, perhaps more simply, by saying "you can think of a citation as a modality". Perhaps it's this phrase that has thrown you?

[EDIT: I've changed the article to try and make the sentence clearer. Thanks for your feedback.]

It seems to me that "degree of confidence" is clear enough, and that it's clear enough that a modality can have a degree of confidence associated with it.

So the article introduces two technical terms you're perhaps not familiar with, but I'd suppose someone who can read a CS paper or write a program can cope with that much.
Ask HN: How are you doing redis failover?
I've seen several large entities using redis in production, such as GitHub.

Due to Redis Cluster being at least 6 months from an RC, how are you guys doing failover and upgrades without downtime?

There seems to be two options that I've seen, and they are:

1. Juggle around virtual IPs upon a redis-server dying, so that the clients can still use the same IP, without knowing a secondary IP in advance.

2. Modify each redis client implementation to switch over to the secondary IP upon connection refuse.

What are you guys actually doing, or what are some suggestions for making Redis more fault tolerant?
I find this article to be very clear and readable overall, despite the presence of a few "cultural markers" such as the above language. In comparison with the truly opaque and mostly content-free works of the most notorious poststructuralists, the claim of the article ("assertions about programmer productivity are presented as scientific facts but are not founded on a large body of experimental evidence we expect from such claims") is clearly stated. That said, my own personal experience and observation is that the 10x claim probably underestimates the difference in productivity between the best and worst coders.
Android can do that.
UPDATE: day 2, still no response from support@zoneedit.com.
they can just ban all hTTPS and whitelist banks, paypal, facebook etc
Funny, I can write the exact opposite of your point with that same argument.

A lot of engineers dealing with highly complex problems know that things are more intricate than they appear on the surface. (Compare the BP oil well disaster to a cut firehose, seemingly analogous, but almost every solution to the second will not work on the first) Often the elegant solution that works in theory fails in practice, and requires several iterations adding subsystems to deal with small problems that crop up in testing.

Politicians that see only in black and white really ignore these inconvient details while they espose rhetoric and focus on reelection. Their simplistic and naive view of the world doesn't allow them to tackle the hard problems that take nuance and balancing benefit against unintended side effects.
> The funny thing is until I started reading HN I had no idea the extent to which people are out here building apps frantically for the "big exit".

not really that surprising. while a great tech resource, HN is, of course, an offshoot of YC.
The Efficiency Dilemma: greater efficiency leads to more usage?
I didn't complain about that. The developers I work with are amazing :)

(oh and of course they have a ton of equity)
Direct link: http://www.zurb.com/playground/css-boxshadow-experiments
More likely a combination of both: Mossad for the details of what is inside Iran's program and deploying the worm, and the US for the technical skills to build it.
How about a "tweet this" link on the profile page to make it easier to share?
Second paragraph of this link: "Wolves, dogs and dingos are subspecies of Canis lupus." Did you think I just made it up?
I really wouldn't mind this at all if it weren't being sold as Internet access.

Mobile YouTube? Fine. Mobile Facebook? Great. If it's a walled garden, call it that and discount it accordingly. But once you have "Internet" and "more Internet," something's gone terribly wrong.
IIRC they get something like $15 for each Windows Phone OEM license and something like $50 for each full Windows OEM license. That's probably a big part of the reason they'd prefer to stick with full Windows in as many markets as possible.
Beans make you gassy

Much less so if you soak them (ideally in a slightly caustic solution) and cook them at high temperature (i.e., boiling under pressure). The former will leach oligosaccharides, and the later will break them down.
http://www.metricly.com/
And you'll notice that the BBC and CNN reports don't have any of the background or details that would give you intellectual gratification. "Mossad killed a guy, here are all the press releases we were sent" like the BBC and CNN news certainly wouldn't belong on Hackers News, but I think this article does.
It's a hardware issue with the x87 instruction set,

http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2003-08/msg01195.html is a good explanation.
We can debate the necessity of war until the end of time, but those bailouts were a definite need.

Agree on the lacking restraint though. The problem is even worse, though: a misrepresentation of the facts. A family that purchases enough gas for 40k miles in travel AND takes a yearly vacation AND spends $10k on "cleaning and house maintenance" isn't excessive--it's divorced from reality.
Bicycles have training wheels to get you going. Erlang doesn't. It might be hard and require effort.

I don't know how you learn new things, but it's generally taking me lots of effort: math, sports, music, etc. They're all hard when you first begin.

I remember I couldn't ever do anything good on a bass guitar (I started learning with a terrible sense of rhythm, not being able to clap on a 4/4 beat). I thought that music was just too hard, that the notation was too complex and obtuse for the sake of it, that improvising and jamming took some natural skill to get. It doesn't. All it takes is work, lots of it. It's hard because it's different and not something you pick up easily without prior experience. And even once I learned how to play bass (and have been for years now), I can't play drums for shit because it requires an entirely different way to think about music, notation and synchronism. You have to get in a different mindset when you switch instruments, or even just bands.

As for sports, mastery takes years. Of course someone in a good physical condition will pick up some of them with more ease than someone not used to many sports, but if you're a trained ice hockey player, the skillset you learn won't apply with the same ease for baseball or basketball when compared to roller hockey or field hockey. You have to go back to some basics. Re-learn how to position yourself, new strategies, discover muscles you hadn't trained before.

I see learning new programming languages as something somewhat related -- Languages can do their best to be friendly, but when the concepts behind them just vary wildly (see Prolog vs. C), you'll likely hit a wall. And it will not be the language's fault, but a question of you working hard enough to grasp it. Many languages have similar concepts and could be compared to switching from Bass Guitar to a cello, or from football to flag football. Python and Ruby have different syntaxes, but switching from one to the other is often a question of details. Even going back and forth with PHP is a similar thing. Going from Scheme to Common Lisp isn't as big of a leap as going from Prolog to C. I do believe Erlang (and many functional languages) fit this concept.

If you've never worked with them before, you'll be surprised by persistent data structures, the absence of O(1) arrays, message passing semantics, share-nothing ideas, lack of global data, an environment without main loops (or any kind of loops), different ways to handle exceptions, a specific way to package and write applications, lack of namespaces, new syntax, atoms, pattern matching, linked-lists as strings, bit syntax, etc. Of course the first contact will suck if many of these concepts are foreign -- you have to learn from scratch when you likely were very proficient in many other languages. You will be slow, your code might be slow, and everything will look unfriendly.

Obviously some languages are suffering from bad design, but knowing Erlang, I don't believe it's one of these. Hence my position on blaming lack of familiarity before syntax or any other reason. You have the right to disagree, but I would like to know your reasons for it if you do :)
BigDataCamp - Santa Clarita, CA - Jan 31, 2011
Just use less.js for all your hsl needs in IE:

https://github.com/cloudhead/less.js/wiki/Functions
Yeah, that's not the tone I got from this at all. There are aspects of Erlang that can be hard to get used to, but it really isn't fair to criticize the language for not conforming to your previous experience.
Not at all. Transistor density keeps marching on - it's clock rates that have stagnated, and they did so quite a while ago.

So we're getting more and more transistors on a chip, but it's prohibitively expensive in terms of power consumption and other tradeoffs to use them to make individual execution units faster. The solution? Use those extra transistors to cram more cores and more cache on the die.
Awesome guys! You've educated me!
How to Tell Stories with Data?