skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
for those curious, this could provide similar benefits to javascript (or other dynamic) language experimentation that pypy does in python:

http://codespeak.net/pypy/dist/pypy/doc
and telephone companies can't take credit for providing that value. it's an inevitable and virtually costless feature of the infrastructure.

if you monopolized the worlds supply of air, you can't claim to provide value after charging people to breath.
The startup I co-founded, Heyo (http://heyo.com), went through DayOne Ventures (http://dayoneventures.com) last summer in Blacksburg, VA (small town in SW VA where Virginia Tech is located).

It was the first year, and we were the first company they invested in, and the only company to do their summer program. The largest benefit by far was access to mentors: the primary guys involved are a group of entrepreneurs who started a company called Webmail.us which is now Rackspace Email and Apps, and they all still work at Rackspace. Another primary group of mentors are some folks at Modea, a quickly-growing digital ad agency in Blacksburg.

We were working on a totally different idea when we initially took investment, and this group helped us pivot to Heyo, and put together a follow-on funding round in the Fall, and has recently made some introductions in the Valley that have prompted us to make the decision to move out there in May of this year. Having access to the Rackspace and Modea folks has been huge, from introductions to experience in growing a company from 2-3 people to 100+ people, to help with fundraising, understanding our market, etc. As the only company who has been with DayOne from inception, I absolutely recommend it.
Compatible Opinions on Software
This would be a good start:
http://generichid.sourceforge.net/index.html

A toolkit for making your own USB human interface devices. Supports a variety of chipsets, including the AVR variants in the parent comment. Comes with its own crazy visual drag and drop programming language.

Get involved!

EDIT: Aha! found the link I was looking for: "Program Your Own Mayhem-Causing USB Dongle" http://hackaday.com/2010/04/05/program-your-own-mayhem-causi...

It's a video presentation BTW. And it is seriously devious: "There’s also a light sensor that can be used to activate a command once an unknowing victim has shut off the lights in the office and left for the day."

EDIT2: For bonus evil-points, solder it into a USB hub, run a real HID into the same hub, and hide the whole thing inside the HID, with the hub's host port wired up to the cable of the HID. Read the link below to see what I mean.

http://www.thice.nl/hide-your-data-in-plain-sight-usb-hardwa...
Indeed, using a smartphone to emulate a keyboard is definitely overkill, but it is also a really effective mechanism. Nobody thinks twice before plugging someone else's phone into their computers.
The interface is a little overwhelming -- maybe it's more natural on a mobile device, though. From the video I saw there are too many features. I'm not a musician, but I know a couple and they're not the meticulous type that want to track everything.
I'm surprised that Twitter uses jQuery. That doesn't make sense to me at all, since Twitter's site should be a professional, high-performance web site. That's exactly a counter-indication for jQuery, which is suitable only for low-performance web sites made by JavaScript beginners. jQuery is far too poor performance-wise and far too unreliable for any important web site.

My guess is that Twitter used jQuery's CSS selector query in a situation where searching for a selector is totally unnecessary and undesirable, because it is much slower than any sensible method to find an element.
EMC aims to beat rivals with storage server under $10k
HTML5 is just HTML
While I understand the need for a metric to see where you should allocate R&D resources, most of these types of articles(as in not just this one, most of the iOS or Android as well) seem to be more interested in a branding popularity contest than providing any sort of useful info. Personally I dont care if swarms of people love or hate the device I use as long as it serves my needs. It just seems sorta tabloid-y to me.
I actually have a band and this app could be for me this summer. But I didn't get it at all the first time. The only reason I looked at it twice was that I found it here on HN. Not all your potential customers are the typical music-branch-guy.
Also, something to easier distinguish different widgets would really help! User defined color or something.

I really like the one-man-army way. Keep it up, you got some good stuff going on!
PeerCast.org comes to mind. April 2002. IIRC it was based on Gnutella.
I agree with what you're saying here. However, when things start getting seriously weird, an assembly language debugger can be invaluable.

For example, if your C compiler is generating bad code, or if you've violated some low-level assumption, it's hard to figure out what's going on by inspecting the source code. Sooner or later, the high-level abstractions break, and there's nothing you can do except single-step through the code that's going wrong.

I once found a bug in MSVC++ while compiling Quake 2. The compiler was performing a tail-call optimization, but it hadn't noticed that Carmack had stored a pointer to a local variable in a global variable. The stack frame was overwritten while the variable was still live, causing weird stuff to go wrong. This is not the kind of bug that you can quickly find by staring at C code. :-)
You mean Senator. The Government has sovereign immunity, but if a ridiculous patent were to seriously threaten the family business of a sitting Senator we might see something get done.
Debugging is just another tool. It's not the most valuable tool, but it's also not the least valuable.
At work we rely heavily on logging and trace statements. There isn't even a functioning debugger for our UI language implementation.

I'd say not having a debugger is more like programming on paper. When you have a problem, you might end up thinking about it a little more because you can't rely on that one other tool.
I'm guessing you use a Mac where it's a simple "Opt+e; e" combination. You just have to remember that an acute accent is Opt+e and then type the letter you want it over. On Windows with US settings, it's Alt+0233 (for "e" with an acute accent; you have to remember other codes for other letters with an acute accent). So, with Windows, you omit the accent mark because it's painful. Unless one has a stellar memory, you have to go into the character map, find the letter you're looking for and then use the 4-digit code to produce it.

If someone knows an easier way of doing it on Windows, I'd love to know (since one of my friends has an accent in her name).
Rails 3 Remote Links and Forms Part 2: Data-type (with jQuery & Responder)
A lot depends on how good your debugger is. If you're coding C# in Visual Studio or Java in Eclipse, the debugger is dead easy to use and works well for solving problems.

On the other hand, the only thing I use gdb for is cheating at nethack (+99 blessed Unicorn horn anyone?) and looking for buffer overflows. There are a few PHP debuggers out there but I've yet to get one to really work right.

My main trouble with printf-debugging in all it's forms is that you end up making changes to code that don't always go away. Even if you do it right 99% of the time, you'll insert 1000's of printf's over the course of a month and sooner or later one of those will end up visible to end users, will fill up your logs with junk messages, or otherwise gunk up the works.

Of course, there's something to say with fixing bugs by looking at the code ~thinking~. Yesterday I was tracking down a bug involving an area of code that I didn't trust, and ended up refactoring it, converting some properties in an interface into readonly methods of an abstract base class so I knew for a fact that certain variables wouldn't change after initialization.

This work convinced me that the code was wack, but when it was done, I knew the problem involved initialization of the objects. For a second I thought about using the debugger, but finding the specific case that was causing trouble would have been tough.

At that point I decided to trace the codepath involved and immediately saw the cause of the problem and understood the root cause (certain initialization code was duplicated in two places, which is just asking for things to break.)

I could have fixed the bug quicker by just following the codepath, but spending some time cleaning up code I was scared of will pay dividends in the future... And it's a good example of the tradeoffs you face when you fix bugs.

That said, I particularly find printf-debugging useful when something strange and difficult-to-reproduce is going on, particularly in a production system.
Enterprise Level Competitive Keyword Research
keyword research at enterprise level
Social Gaming Company Kabam Raises $30 Million, Plans Acquisitions
Unless I'm out in the sun, I prefer reading on my iPad to reading on a Kindle -- but since Amazon has the largest selection of e-books, I end up reading on my iPad using their Kindle application.

Amazon wins both ways.
Thanks for the links

Quote from http://historical.whatitcosts.com/facts-korean-war-pg2.htm

> Human Costs
> 33,600 American lives lost in this conflict.

So non-Americans don't count?
The problem with the patent system is that you can patent things that do not exist. Is it ridiculous?
LoveFilm also white-labels its service. List here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lovefilm#Operate_rental_service...

It would be interesting to know what proportion of LoveFilm's business is under its own brand, versus under these other brands, and whether amazon will continue to white-label the service long term.
I'm pretty sure we accept a screen shot of the account page.
Possibly patents on methods of raising money online for political campaigns or patenting a method for organising large groups of people to congregate in a public area for the purposes of hearing political speech.
You have a 24 hour window for a deal like this and you know it costs you $10 for everyone who games the system. So you let the hackers think they've won then after the 24 hours is up, reveal that they've lost. Instead of finding creative and more difficult ways to game the system, the hackers wasted their 24 hours partying and getting drunk and so LivingSocial wins.

Probably not exactly how it went down, but it's a good story.
A miserable programmer is a miserable person and won't be happy with good tools and technologies. Likewise, a "skillful" programmer could be a like a skillful mechanic that builds a good set of tools.

The best mechanics I've known ended up working in jobs where they like the cars they maintain (Honda, Porsche, classic car restoration). The less skillful ones seem "trapped" working with cheap parts or cobbling things together and not doing a great job of it. They tend to have excuses about why the cars or parts are engineered poorly. I've also known very skillful mechanics that are proud of their ability to keep beat up old cars running inexpensively regardless of the brand and making their own tools rather than buying fancy ones.

Likewise, a good programmer will know the limits of the systems they are working in and will strive to not do quick fixes that cause problems later. They may also make their own tools and libraries...and they will move to companies with better politics or projects when opportunities arise.
Customizing the vi and Vim editors
SEO Tactics to Avoid
Great post on seo tactics to avoid if you still in a era where dinosaurs rome the earth.
Right, but the suggestion was that it's free to try, even if the case ends up being thrown out.
I think that's the main problem, you have to get "lucky" in order to get text translation that is "sufficient to find out the gist of the message".
I don't want to be morose but many of the countries listed also have significant suicide rates. Finland, in particular, has the highest rate in western Europe with Switzerland not far behind. I guess everything comes with a price.
Great idea with a lot of potential.

I'd strongly consider a complete from-the-ground up rethink of the new-user flow. This may sound harsh, but I'd argue that as the site exists now there is no clear new-user flow. There's no concise path through what's being presented.

If you're stuck, a good exercise is to go grab 5 people and show them the site. Don't explain anything. See what they do. See if they get it. See if they interact with it the way you expect a new, fresh potential user to. (In effect this is what you did by posting to HN, and we're probably a big chunk of your target.)

To be honest, I didn't even try the service because I'm not sure what to do/click:

1. There's no clear call to action other than the red "create your page now" button, which I'm not going to click if it requires an email address/website, when I don't understand what I'm signing up for yet. "View a sample page", "see demo", might be better.

2. The most prominent thing that jumps off the page visually is "$9/mo". I think I understand that you're selling a value-added service (which is good), but why don't you hook me on trying the service for free, or pitch me a great demo before showing me dollar signs? Seeing the value-added pitch at the top and in prominent color, before I understand the service is a clear path to my browser's back button.

3. "try it free for a few days with no obligation" isn't comforting. What happens after a few days? Is the basic "here's a pretty landing page for your soon-to-be-built site" a free service indefinitely? It's just not clear.

It's as if you need to step back and consider what one simple goal is most important to you for a new user landing on this site, and then strip away everything that doesn't directly support that. To paraphrase some quote: "perfection isn't achieved by adding, it's achieved when there's nothing left to take away."

I hope the comments here will prove helpful (and not too harsh), and again, great idea. Good luck with it.
Thanks for the response. I'm actually looking to move to Palo Alto for the summer to attempt to get a few of my ideas off the ground a little faster. I'd love to use the bay area as a test bed for this type of concept, so feel free to get in touch with me at sntsrv@gmail.com.
These are great edge cases, but certainly not the common case. I think, in general, people jump to a debugger well before they're ready to actually understand what the debugger is telling them. This turns into a random walk through the source and ends up being a pretty big waste of time, compared to actually reading and understanding what's going on.

That being said, I'm planning on using gdb this afternoon to debug an x86 (16-bit) bootloader I wrote 4 years ago. It was part of a class project, and the prof ended up using it as example code. I think there are subtle bugs in it though...
How to write good startup advice articles
The Real World's Happiest Countries, not the utopian world of Forbes and Heritage Foundation:

http://www.happyplanetindex.org
Nokia's quarterly profits have dropped 40 percent year-on-year. Symbian lost 10% of it's marketshare in one year and Android's worldwide marketshare is now quickly approaching that of Symbian.

I think the future (and the profits) are undoubtedly in smartphones and that's an area where Nokia has, so far, been unable to compete and they don't seem to have a working strategy going forward.
Wouldn't the print statements have the possibility of screwing up the optimized code (changing register allocations, for example)? Or screwing up the timing? (I realize a debugger would definitely screw up the timing)
You are right - my mistake. I misread the original post as it being "free" for Twitter to allow it to go to court and run their defense against the lawsuit from there. Did not realize that the OP was implying free from the plaintiff's perspective. Sorry about that!
Gorilla Glass has a new competitor called Dragontrail
Corporate reputation is one thing, private reputations are far more fragile I think and the trolls have lots of tools at their disposal to make your life hell.

I'm currently hip-deep in tracking a guy that has been harassing some of the users of my website in ways that defy they imagination (and I thought I'd seen it all), and with every layer of dirt that gets peeled back more is revealed.

Really, if someone has it it in for you online they have a pretty easy time and you'll have a very hard time trying to get rid of things that damage you. This is in large part due to the unwillingness of the larger players to keep their userbase in check, and if the language in which the harassment takes place is not English then you're facing an even bigger uphill battle.

Managing your online reputation should be easier than it is today, the damage is very real and it is with the current tools for a non-technical person next to impossible to put a stop to it.

I can see why beevolve targets businesses but there definitely is a lot of work to be done for private individuals as well.
I agree with what several have already pointed out here, that a key point is that the famous programmers interviewed already understood their code and hence using a debugger to better understand it is not particularly useful.

I've been struck over the years at how one of key benefits of the Smalltalk environment -- being able to explore/change things in a program while it's running -- is not more widely regarded in the field. I occurs to me now that the interviewed programmers might have already gotten much of the cognitive benefit of such exploration at the beginning of a project. For them, print statements and listings are a way of confirming details of what they expect to be happening as the code runs. For un-godlike programmers (and maintenance work), debugging is complicated by the lack of deep understanding of how the code is supposed to work, hence the need for more exploration time and debuggers.
AT&T mauled in oral arguments in arguing for "personal privacy" for corporations
Some really good points in here, and things I can relate to myself with my own experiences of getting a product off the ground (I'm still in the middle of that, so this serves as a nice reminder too!).

Key take-aways for me:

Let users tell you how they want to use the product
Keep improving existing features
Make your users feel close
Keep making your product easier to use
Always improve customer service

I recently had a phone call with one of the early customers for my new venture. She said that it was my responsiveness and reaching out to help which she was happiest about. She then said she will be sticking around and will be telling her friends too. That has urged me to do more of the same.
Hahaha! This is exactly what I wanted to say!
My intuition has always been that the rates are higher in otherwise "happy" countries because the people at risk feel far more isolated from the rest of the populace.
Exclusive Interview: Posterous Founder, Sachin Agarwal
Why is this being upvoted? The entire article boils down to "People say nasty things about your business online. Products like ours help you find when they do that"

There's a story to illustrate this, but then -- and this is the kicker -- we never find out who the guy is or what his beef was. If we had, it would have been an acceptable story. But as it is, I can't see what people will get of value from spending their time reading it
(Aside from the commercial value the writers got, of course, and I don't begrudge them that. Just trying to help them with providing a better trade for the reader next time)

This article promised to be a great detective story, with lots of twists and perhaps with a surprise ending. But it wasn't that. That makes it frustrating.
It's a difficult problem to solve, and probably not worth the effort. Anything you do is fraught with running into the "Keyboard not detected, press F1 to continue" situation, especially in an uncontrolled environment like Windows.
This article[1] suggests that the Ovi store gets 2.7 million app downloads a day. The Apple App store gets 17 million app downloads a day with less than half the marketshare.

[1] http://conversations.nokia.com/2010/11/09/10-reasons-why-you...
I think this brings up an interesting point of discussion: what should sites do now and what should they do later?

In this case, a quick server-side check that did the same thing as a client-side validation seems like a no brainier, but what about bigger, more complex actions?

What kinds of actions are you guys deferring while actually telling the customer something else (and notifying them later if something ultimately fails)?
My great grandchildren will be looking forward to the results :P
I agree that proper logging can replace the need for a debugger in many instances, but so can proper testing, talented devs, unlimited time, unlimited budget, etc.

Under ideal circumstances (i.e. not real world), no one would ever need to fire up a debugger, but (most of us) don't work in those conditions.

Can you create world-class software using only print statements to debug? Sure. Is that an efficient use of your time? Probably not.

The bottom line is debuggers are just another tool in the development aresenal, and dismissing them merely because you can accomplish the same task in another way is asinine.
I wouldn't give up the Kindle for anything. The E-Paper screen feels much more comfortable on my eyes. Its size is perfect for having it always with me and reading with one hand in bed or on the train/bus. And I don't interact much with the Kindle anyways except turning pages or opening another book from the main screen.
"Proper logging > debugger."

I assume that statement refers to the amount of noise in question?

Sure, print statements are my normal tool, but often I'm working on transforming one data structure into another (compiler-style) and I'm encountering an error "somewhere" down in the middle. After the first few megabytes of logging output get generated, you start to really lose the thread of what's going on.

It depends on what you're doing. If you're a CRUD programmer, yeah, I can see how they'd be useless; that's a good deal of my job too and I don't use them then. But when I'm actually doing something interesting and twisty I often need them, if only to set some conditional breakpoints somewhere so I can get into the middle of a complicated process instead of trying to reconstruct the state later.

Also they are great for learning libraries by stepping through them.
Completely agree - I loved philosophy so much in college that I changed my art minor to philosophy. You wouldn't think that CompSci and Philosophy would go good together, but I couldn't be happier with the results. Some of the classes even have direct correlation with how you should think as a programmer. You should ABSOLUTELY take a Logical Reasoning course.. unfortunately for most schools that is a 2 or 3 hundred level course so you may have to take some philosophy intro classes first.
I thought that it has to be deemed a matter or national security for that to happen? Then again that's just a signature away...
The Importance of Isolation
I didn't have a problem with ms using sco to sue for them. I had a problem with ms using patent lawsuits to attempt to crush the competition. Suing in self-defense is a different matter.
I agree in general that Palm was grossly undervalued. But I also think the author is overvaluing patents. Microsoft, who supposedly dwarfs Google and Apple in patents, still struggles to profit from those ideas. And IBM, whose patent portfolio dwarfs them all, also has a smaller market cap than Apple, Google, or Microsoft.

Google might not have a quantity of patents, but it seems to have enough quality patents to sit quite comfortably.
why did google need to ANSWER Wikipedia in the first place?
Nokia Cancels U.S. Launch of X7 Phone