skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree.

To the GP's point though, they still weren't doing effective pairing for the 'training' or 'coaching' scenario. The pairing was contentious and out of balance. The coach didn't do any coaching.

> ...if I paused too long, or seemed to be typing the wrong thing -- my pair had another keyboard, and he would type over me to try to “finish the sentence” rather than talk to me.

In this case, a coach should engage the driver. Ask about what he's thinking and nudge him in the correct direction if needed. Coaching is a lot like driving school. The coach uses his brakes (keyboard) very seldom. If the coach is using his brakes very often, it is as likely as not that the coach is the problem (too scared, poor instruction, etc) and not the driver.

There are simple tricks. I usually put my keyboard behind the monitor. I've also turned my keyboard around so that I'm looking at the keys upside down. Those both take physical effort to get the keyboard in position to type. Another strategy that I've heard is oven mitts (I really want to try this one!) :)

Edit: Also, another strike against his coach (though this is more programming related..)

> To me, this was “refactor mercilessly” and “once and only once.” But to my partner, this was a violation of “do the simplest thing that could possibly work.”

I'd agree with the OP here. Simplest thing is how you get tests to pass. DRYness is a property of code quality. They are orthogonal. Refactor mercilessly when you have green tests in order to keep quality high. Do the simplest thing when you have a red test in order to deliver features.
you will succeed =)
No one should have to suffer what this particular man suffered. Holy crap that's depressing.
Remind HN: We have a cognitive bias to "blame the victim"
There is a cognitive bias I learned about in my sociology class that is especially relevant today with the popularity of the “Sacked by an Algorithm” post (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2049105). It’s colloquially called “blaming the victim” and it’s the tendency we have, when seeing someone who got in a car accident, is being beaten by a policeman, is a abused by a spouse, etc., to think that they probably deserved or earned it.

When considering someone in a different position than us, we tend to imagine it’s because they are different more than we should; it’s more likely that we would behave similarly in a similar situation (than we would tend to believe).

Related reading:

DDG search for "Fundamental Attribution Error"
http://duckduckgo.com/?q=fundamental+attribution+error

"Victim blaming" on Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victim_blaming

"Cognitive bias"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_bias

"Psychology of Victimhood"
http://www.zurinstitute.com/victimhood.html
The first thing I thought of after trying the Kinect was the robot in the reboot Lost in Space. At one point the kid uses a VR type device to control the robot and right off hundreds of space spiders. Not so great a movie, but very cool looking piece of technology.

The potential for a interesting control schemes using Kinect is just amazing.
Chirply (YC S10) is Hiring Software Engineers
Not to be a troll, but I think this deserves mentioning, because this will be left out in nearly every Tech blog post:

Visitors by company:

Google (9.85%)

Facebook (8.93%)

Yahoo (6.82%)

Microsoft (can't tell, but I expect ~5%)

Yahoo and Microsoft are the only companies with 3 different properties in the top 3 (Google has 2.)
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It's not that debate is bad, it's that debate's duration should be finite.

Unfortunately in this day and age of endless interweb debates, duel does seem like a reasonable idea.
Illustrating the predictability of IDs, I take it?
For a startup that might be short on resources, Rimuhosting will perform sysadmin work for you at $40/hr. That may not seem like a big deal, but their sysadmins are knowledgeable, and always provide a detailed account of the work they've performed. I've yet to find another company with as dedicated a support staff as Rimu.
I really hope what he is doing is deliberately launching a ridiculous large scale patent suit designed to fail on a massive scale that will undermine all future software patent suits, and therefore the whole software patent system.

If he is he's a hero.

If not he's a dick.
PayPal behaves like this too.
Google had no choice:
· He encouraged people to click on ads to bring him income;
· He had a high level of fraudulent clicks detected.
His "encouragement" was mildly phrased, but he mentions that people responded to it by generating fraudulent clicks. This is EXACTLY the kind of person Google MUST ban.
Everything I Know About Game Design I Learned from Super Mario Bros.
"And if I was writing code, I found something very interesting: I don’t think in English when I write code. I think in code first, and I can translate written code to English. When I was trying to talk to people when I was writing code, I found that I’d have to write pseudocode and then talk to them about it -- and when my pair wanted me to talk about code, he wanted me to stop typing. But if I stopped typing, I couldn’t describe what I was doing. Every time I tried to write code and talk to my partner at the same time, I could feel the lurch between what I could feel -- the complex shape of it in my head -- and what I was having to say."

(emphasis mine). What an incredibly familiar description. Does anyone else ever feel this way? This is why in situations where I'm trying to describe a solution I end up just grabbing the keyboard, doing it myself, and letting the code talk for itself.

For me, pair programming comes easily when describing a solution that can be simply defined and understood. Doesn't matter how difficult the problem itself is. Pair programming becomes more difficult once you have to interrupt your coding to facilitate the process. As an introvert, this comes incredibly unnaturally to me.
Top Tech Failures of 2010
Its certainly tough to come up with project names that are unique these days, but Dremel? Its a well-known consumer brand of tools in the US. Did Google's Dremel name derive from something other than the tool brand?

Google's project is certainly not in the same market that the Dremel tools brand, but is it ok for a company like Google to borrow from a brand name in a different market?
Review my webapp, PopRead
I was looking for a quick way to find the more interesting stuff in my twitter and fb feeds so I did this http://rockieweb.com/popread/ Input? Thanks.
Hot girls get hit on and proposed to several times a day by eager men. That translates to about 100 times a month and 1200 times a yar. If you don't believe me go ask one. Especially Programmer girls.
Wow maybe this could be a black hat strategy. Find a target and click fraud them until they get banned. Maybe he was a victim of this method. If I relied on Ad-sense, I would be concerned about this.
Ask HN: Cool homepage domains
I'm looking for cool homepage domain names if you have seen any ?
> Google can't win this battle and they do the best anyone can do at that scale.

I agree right up to this point.

The economics of online advertising are extremely harsh when you add up the attention span of online users, the ease of fraud, and the feedback available to advertisers. It's a sea change that people need to come to terms with one way or another.

However the level to which Google dehumanizes publishers is quite likely to bite them in the ass. Enough of these articles and their publisher base will eventually shrink and open the door the competition. Now obviously the competition will not be able to change the economics, but PR is not Google's forté, and it's possible to do a much better job handling these incidents without any change in the economics.
The problem is he built up a kinship with his viewers which included his financial plight: I film myself huddling around a tray of candles in the boat as the ice slides past the hull in the winter.

I think you're reading way too much into his remarks.

Most small sailing boats have only small auxiliary engines or batteries providing DC power. Safety requires power conservation. But video cameras require light to record an image, and most pro video lighting consumers a lot of juice but doesn't run on DC power. If it's not windy, candles efficiently provide both heat and light, and solve other video problems as well (color aesthetics).

My dad sails, I've worked most of the last decade in independent film. Anyone who's into sailing or pro video understands that both are fairly high-maintenance activities with a significant cost of both time and equipment (and that discussions of this overhead is a regular conversation topic). I find it quite easy to believe he makes an overall loss on the sailing vids at present, although over a few years it has the potential to provide greater revenue (eg a documentary of the entire journey, gradual accumulation of subscribers etc.).
Louis Vuitton luggage
There's a better reason for seatbelts on buses.

Keep those little frackers in their seats.

If everyone isn't buckled in, driver should stop the bus.

$15k to install seatbelts? What if they weren't made from gold (or the gold lining the pockets of the vendor).
I started in 5th grade by accident. Yes, accident. My dad bought me a Mac and a book called "BASIC for Mac."
Thanks for the clarification, I guess folks (AWS) have gotten sloppy with semantics.
Is there anything that tracks API calls?
Why are you assuming that the kids want to get to school quickly?
Since you didn't phrase this in terms of "Rejection Therapy" I have to assume it didn't pop up on your radar. It was pretty popular on here a couple of weeks ago, and Jason Shen even did a series about trying it out.

How long ago was this? The therapist was probably ahead of his time!
No worries.

Yep you're spot-on in this case, and as you say the software signing keys hasn't been compromised, though they aren't needed in service mode.

There are definitely ways the dongle keys could have been better protected (and I'm sure a few people are having some very serious talks about why they weren't), but have to give Sony kudos for having a system last 3 years without being compromised, and even now it's only easily broken at ring 2; the gameOS level of the system.
Footnote on the first page:

Dremel is a brand of power tools that primarily rely
on their speed as opposed to torque. We use this
name for an internal project only.
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Yahoolocaust
Understand that the patent is really just a pretext. If Paul freakin' Allen the billionaire wants to make trouble for you, he can and will. He probably won't. Just do your thing. If there's something you can do to get his attention on that level, you win.
Thanks for your endorsement. How do you square that, then, with the irresponsible attacks on Greenwald? Why don't they just come out and say precisely this? A response saying "Yes, it sucks that we're not releasing more, and we know why it's sensible to ask, but we have other priorities and for now we think we're making a balanced choice." would be a lot more respectable.

It'd be even better if they'd identify in advance some change in the situation which would alter the equation such that they'd be willing to release more. Outsiders could then better gauge what kind of trade-off they're making, and it also gives an accountability horizon such that outsiders can later on assess whether they made the right trade-off. That's a much easier pill to swallow than "We're right, now shut up and go away."
Ask HN: Ruby, not loosely typed enough?
I've spent a half day debugging a ruby on rails app having to figure out where to put the .to_f so it doesn't screw things up (in more then one place in the code).

Why does Ruby have explicit integer and float classes instead of just one numeric class? I understand the precision has to cut off somewhere, but having to handle this int vs float is just silly.
Interesting, but not very useful w/out code =)
This is a really great project! I can think of two things would make it better, but both are beyond your control.

1. Use Hipmunk's (nonexistent at the moment) API and show the least agonizing flight of each day.

2. Somehow include Southwest's flights and prices (which nobody else has, AFAIK)
Interesting I am a logic and appleton user myself but of course knows Cubase.

I am currently writing a book about design for developers and self-publishing it too.

With regards to novels I have to say I don't think I am cut out for that. But I do wish to write a book called "Without God, But not without Belief" one day when I get older and wiser.
Angry Birds: Apple Will Remain Developer Favorite Over Android
BotTorrent? Using BitTorrent as a DDoS Tool
I've had good experiences with pair programming. This does not sound like my experiences and I feel for the writer. It sounds like a horrible situation to have lived through.
Interesting idea.

In iOS the UI looks a little rough:
- the two main blocks below the main graphic aren't sized equally and need a margin between them and some padding for the content of each
- The Get Started Now button isn't on the same line as he email address input. Also, this is presumably the Call to Action, but I can't really tell - it should be more emphasized visually
- the Welcome to Popread BETA text needs a margin between it and the header
- rather than straight black and white you might go with a subtle eggshell and deep midnight blue. This will match the yellow star and center graphic while giving a little more visual depth

not sure how much of the above is because I'm on Safari Mobile

Overall: Major props for submittig to HN. I wish you the best!

-
ceo is a ex-mckinsey partner who draws a $400k salary. what do you expect the internal culture is like?
Ask HN: Online CS Degrees
Why is it harder to find an online CS degree program (graduate/undergraduate) than an online degree program in something like graphic design, nursing, criminal justice, etc.?
Try dot.tk

http://www.dot.tk/en/index.html
A crude way would be to send an email to #@carrier.tld (e.g. 1234567890@verizon.net) and it will be converted to SMS by the carrier.
Sarah Palin’s Transparency Problem
Four Hangover Cures That Actually Work
I think your depiction of the ruby community is accurate. We definitely like to promote what we're doing, be it on our blogs, at conferences, on twitter, at meetups, etc.

Last year at LaRubyConf, Sarah Allen called the ruby community "the programming community for extroverts". I couldn't agree more.

I think your analysis of the community is more a result of that than any level of pomposity, vainness, or even simple hand-waving. Sure, those things will always occur to some extent. But I think it's really a result of positive attributes, and maybe a dash of success ;)

I also think people's attitudes towards engineers have changed markedly in more recent years. Gone are the days of nerdy dudes updating bank software in "Office Space". Who is everyone's favorite CEO these days? Steve Jobs. What was one of the biggest blockbuster hits of the year? A movie about a nerdy dude at Harvard building a web app (I know, that's not what the movie is really about). In other words, it's fucking cool to be an engineer these days, especially a software engineer.

I think ruby programmers, being extroverts (generally), have embraced this cultural shift, and dare I say capitalized on it.

I can't deny that people in the ruby community have ample opportunity to become "rockstars" in the community simply by way of self-promotion, but there are just as many of those who are popular for their prolific open source contributions, which is by no means hurt by their self-promotion prowess.

Good observation bj, and great conversation starter.
Yeah I need some more design input for sure, one of the reasons to be here. Thanks.
Ah yes, the "Rome will stand forever" argument. No, wait, it was the "Mongol Empire shall stand forever". No, thats not it. "The Macedonian Empire shall stand forever". Hmm. Or was it "The Holy Roman Empire shall stand forever". No wait, it was the "British Empire shall rule the waves forever".

No, I got it, its "The USA shall rule forever!"
Mozilla exposes older user-account database
Effectively, yes, if you consider keeping secrets to be lying. Saying "clicking on these adds gets me money," could easily be considered indirectly encouraging people to click on ads. And that's against Google's rules... and for good reason.

I don't particularly like Google's lack of transparency, but all this stuff is in the terms you're required to agree to before you start using an AdSense account. Yes, it's a big scary legal document, but you can't say they didn't warn you.
The Drop
> Simplest thing is how you get tests to pass. DRYness is a property of code quality. They are orthogonal. Refactor mercilessly when you have green tests in order to keep quality high.

And once tests are passing, you should be able to convince your partner the code isn't dry simply by pointing out duplication, preferably 3 or 4 instances of it so you have enough examples to generalize a solution. You don't need tests to convince him something needs done.
I think soap operas is a more apt way of describing internet drama: hard to follow, last a long time, and when you get right down to it: the content of the drama is very thin, so why bother?
I wish he would continue his "state of the web" posts.
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Nice initiative to get more girls (and women) involved in web development.
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I had a similar reaction. The good news is that, regardless of his true intentions, enough high-profile ridiculous suits like this will be the most powerful catalyst for severe reform.
The technological revolution is more intertwined every day with our economy
I assume they picked TCL because they are tied to OpenACS.

I'd assume it's no coincidence that one of the ArsDigita's problem sets for OpenACS involved a reservation system with OpenACS and PL/PGSQL.
Yes, sorry, I was.

I should have added the link, plus this link:
http://vaig.be/2010/12/joel-test-for-software-companies.html
and this:
http://developers.slashdot.org/developers/10/12/26/1424243.s...
This guy describes a really common antipattern I've seen with pair-programmers, call it "Workstation Chain Gang". This is where all work is done sitting side-by-side at a computer, and the only times you get up are for the bathroom or eating.

The best pair programmers I've worked with will often do things like: say "let's take a walk" and then talk through design problems, get up and use a whiteboard, say "I want to read about this. Let's get back together in half an hour." Or even say, "I need some alone time" They attend to their own needs along with the needs of their pair. This can take a lot of personal courage and honesty sometimes, and requires an environment that encourages attending to yourself.

This guy sounds like he felt like he needed to put on a continuous show for his partner, and that was really hard for him. Which it is!

I bet he was right that he had to be constantly chained to the workstation. The "eight-week sprint" sounds like a pretty awful slog, especially with the set-in-stone up-front design. Overall, it sounded like a lousy, poorly managed setup.

Its too bad that he associated it with pair programming particularly, but oh well. There's many ways of working in the world, and it sounds like he's happier now.
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My grandfather use to complain about "coolies" coming on board his ship (he was chief engineer) posing as customs and just making drawings. "They are just copying us" he would complain. "They'll never be any good".

He passed away before he had to see this: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jimmyspics/420430027/
You also do not need it in JavaScript.

var x = function y() {
...
y();
...
}

'y' is only bound within the function and allows the function to refer to itself. I.e. you can have anonymous, recursive functions, which is useful in "memberfunctions".

Actually the more common

function f() {}

is identical to

var f = function f() {}

and not

var f = function() {}

Edit: Of course there's also arguments.callee...
I think the author is conflating Pair Programming with other concepts.

There are no high notes, no thought out design. There’s only the design that could have tests written for it, in the time you had to write the tests. The classes look reasonable at first glance, and the methods are seemingly bug free. But the cracks are there, if you know where to look. ...

Eventually, I realized that many of my partners had never worked outside a test driven development process: they didn’t have the same idea of design or architecture as patterns distinct from code. Trying to argue for encapsulation or adherence to SOLID principles is pointless if your partner has no background, let alone hands on experience, with what you’re saying. This goes double when you’re talking about hard-won domain expertise: the more I knew about a subject, the less I could say. ...

The large part of pair programming was doing things in “The Simplest Possible Way That Could Work.” In practice, this meant doing it the way that it had been done previously, with the least possible amount of change. ...

What on earth does any of that have to do with Pair Programming?