skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
but its the choices you hate

Indeed. However, the poor choice would not matter if there was option to fix that.

we end up with much more useful tools, better experiences, and innovative ideas.

I definitely agree with the 2nd and 3rd points, but how is a piece of software more useful or a better experience because I cannot customize it to be more useful to myself?

you end up with animated Myspace backgrounds, skinable MP3 players, and corporate portals.

Actually, two of these are examples of designers not giving an option to change things. Backgrounds should be able to be turned off (see how most IM clients will allow you to disable font styles to make things readable when talking to that friend who uses dark purple text on a black background). Corporate portals are example where there's no choice, assuming I'm reading that right. As for "skinnable MP3 players", I absolutely love foobar2000 specifically for that feature. I'm truly not getting how that's a bad thing, at all.

But I'm not going to trash Twitter for taking that risk. Should they have thought it through more? I think so. Should they keep doing things in a similar spirit? Yes.

This is where I think we simply disagree in philosophy. I can see how, as a designer, forcing new and interesting interfaces on a user can sometimes lead to innovation and change for the better. But as a user, I've found that I really dislike 99% of the time that's attempted, and I'd rather have the ability to overwrite what a bad designer decided was brilliant. There are good designs out there that I'm fine with and have never had to change, but most of the time, one interface does not fit everyone. Giving the user choice to tailor the interface to their preference and their use reflects that.

Edit: to expand further, I strongly agree with statement "good design should be transparent". The user should not have to think about the UI; it should enable them to do what they'd like painlessly. If a user goes looking for an option to change something that annoys them in the interface, then the interface is getting in the way of the user.

As a side note, this philosophy can be seen at the root of people who love Apple/hate Apple. Those who love Apple tend to admire them for their excellent sense of design and wonderfully made products. Those who hate Apple tend to dislike the idea that Apple tends to make decisions for its users, and have run up against that lack of choice one too many times. At least, that's my perspective as someone on the "generally disliking" side.
> He isn't saying SEO doesn't matter, he's saying that pursuing SEO as a marketing strategy means you have to be very aggressive in order to get any traffic

SO got very significant search traffic with little apparent effort (that may be too harsh, but they were certainly not very aggressive).

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2009/02/the-elephant-in-the...

This was before they made updates to deal with people out working them and at the time they were getting 83% of all their traffic from Google.
Continuing your first point that the industry is fairly young:

We also have a "mythology effect" but with a twist... It applies to companies alive and thriving today (unlike an urban myth where no credible source can be found).

Consider stories from early days at Apple and other companies where no one was older than 30, then 35, then they stopped reporting. That was mid-1980's and into early 1990's for other businesses. Then it repeated in 1999-2000 with brand name dot com start-ups. It's happening today with upstart game companies that consider 7 years experience to be senior level.

So this meme persists on some level with each wave of newcomers (e.g., college grads).

I suspect that the effect gets compounded by newer programmers beginning with relatively newer languages and tools. It's easier to master a language/tool when it grows up with you. I saw this when C became mainstream, with Python, with Ruby, and currently with Clojure, Scala, etc.

When C was blossoming outside of Bell Labs (following Peter Norton's "Industrial Strength Programming Language" article in mid-1980's), when Python was merely v1.5 in 1999, when Ruby wasn't yet associated with Rails-- the majority of people using these were young, looking for an edge and seeking to avoid pitfalls associated with urban myths about what came before. (e.g., pre-ANSI C satisfied concerns that Lisp was slow and required special hardware-- myths circulating college labs of late 1980's)

It's easier to debunk these things today, thanks to the programming languages shoot-out, stackoverflow and threaded comments such as on HN. Due to these reality-check possibilities, we may hopefully put such systemic ignorance behind us.
It doesn't have to be either or. Both are probably true.
If you're interested in this, you might really enjoy the book Fortune's Formula by William Poundstone (ISBN: 0809046377):

link: http://www.bookfinder.com/search/?author=&title=&lan...

The book looks at, among other things, the Kelly Criterion: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelly_criterion
Opinionated software belongs in appliances for consumers, not tools for human beings. People altering their tools and finding unanticipated uses for them is where progress comes from.
Just to take the musician example:

>far more important to being a successful musician are three components

I agree that these are necessary traits to be a successful musician, but they are not sufficient. There are (apparently) many "tiger moms" out there pushing their children with the same amount of relentlessness to excel with a musical instrument. Yet only a handful of them play at Carnagie Hall at 10. I find it hard to believe that those that achieve that level of proficiency were simply "pushed harder" by their parents. This is a poor explanation for the outcome. A better explanation is that the intersection of tiger mom's and genetic aptitude for music is extremely rare.

>then he shouldn't feel sorry for wasting his programming "talent", as there's no such thing

Again, I don't think the evidence bares this out. Taking myself as an example: I've always taken to math extremely easily. I always "got" it with little effort. This even through periods where I cared none about schoolwork and thus didn't do any of it (my report cards reflected this). It was the same with programming. I took my first class in high school and it came extremely easy to me and I've excelled at it ever since. I find it very hard to believe that talent isn't a huge factor in these things.
Correct. This has little to no effect on transaction or corporate practice. Some of these vendors claim to handle M&A due diligence. Having been through one or two mergers/sales myself, I am convinced that no expert system in the near term will be able to replace humans in that area. Unlike discovery, which is focused on a readily-searchable data set like email, the job of piecing together a company's assets and contract obligations is extremely complex business, where the bottleneck is often the mish-mash of paper records and broken contract management tools, and nuanced judgment calls about critical asset dispositions must be made every few hours over the course of months and months. I'm not saying there isn't an obvious, eventual technology solution to these problems – just that it isn't anywhere near as mature as litigation support, discovery, and patent practice.
I'd agree about BitBucket, but Google Code doesn't nearly focus on the developer like the other two. It's not really made for/with the general sense of community and conversation.
From the 1970s until about 2001, the common fonts on Unix systems drew those two characters as something approximating ‘ and ’. This gave us Unix users a simple and easy way to put ‘single’ or “double” quotes into our man pages, our web pages, our TeX documents, pretty much everywhere we would put text.

Unfortunately, the stupid losers at Microsoft and Apple never picked up on this, and eventually the glyph for the apostrophe was standardized as that ugly vertical piece of shit you probably see on your screen right now, which comes from the typewriter days when you would overstrike it with a period in order to make a shitty exclamation point, thus eliminating the need for one key on your cheap-shit typewriter; and the backtick was standardized as being an accent grave with no fucking letter underneath it, which makes a lot of sense when you're printing things out on a fucking dot-matrix printer with backspace, but not on a VT100, let alone a fucking window system.

Well, in the early 2000s, the folks at the X Consortium decided to standardize on making X-Windows apostrophes look like the shitty Microsoft Windows apostrophes, instead of waiting for the douchenozzles at Microsoft to catch up to the ASCII typography we had in the 1970s. So now instead of having shitty quotes only on Microsoft and Macintosh systems, we have shitty quotes everywhere, unless you use non-ASCII characters. (To be fair, all the glyphs looked shitty on X back then, so it's not like we were giving up some kind of Caslonian paradise.) The saving grace is that you actually can use non-ASCII characters now, and they will work everywhere with no problems. They look like this: âHello, world!â .

Anyway, the reason you still sometimes see the old kind of ASCII quote marks is that not every fucking document on the web gets thrown away in six months, because some of us fucking try to write shit that people will still want to read ten or twenty or a hundred years from now. When you see ``this'', you're looking back in time, to the days when characters were bytes and men were men. I mean, you’re looking back—oh, fuck it.
Should CS students be graded on performance?
As a manager, this is the best part of my job. Almost every other bit is drudgery, administration, and distasteful politics.[1]

I love it when an engineer, junior or senior, wanders over and asks a question about something deep or complicated. We can write math or pseudocode on the whiteboard. Even just drawing ``network'' diagrams of things talking to other things helps get me through the day.[2] It's especially rewarding when the lightbulb goes on.

I'm willing to be late to meetings with executives, skip lunch, or stay late at night for these sessions. Don't assume your boss found it painful at all. It's quite likely the best part of his day.

I had the advantage of the same sort of boss at my first real job. In retrospect, he was remarkably patient with me, showing me how to _learn_ the craft of developing software. I had previously been a hack, and he gave me enough knowledge to build my own skillset extremely quickly. (Secret weapons are always handy.)

[1] I went into management because I have an authority problem. Principally, a problem when I perceive ill-informed or untalented authority figures making poor choices that affect me. After a year or two in management, when I learned enough about operations, finance, marketing, etc., I came to the realization that I'm now just in the middle of a pyramid of the same problem. However, I stay because I have priced myself out of the programmer market. I now use the extra money to bootstrap a startup with a friend and save the rest away from the "emergency/retirement" fund so I can burn longer when I do jump ship.

[2] I am not unaware that this is vain and probably more of a status issue than altruism. ``I've still got it,'' and all that.
Git requires that you do a "git add" before doing a "git commit". Mercurial assumes that you want to add all the changed files in your repo (or you can list the files needed in a commit).

This is one of the features of git I most appreciated when I started using it (my first VCS was Mercurial).

I get distracted easily. While I'm rooting through the code base trying to do something, I'll notice something else to fix. And something else. And something else. By the time I've finished whatever I was trying to do in the first place, I've got 5 or 6 different things I've actually done.

In git, it's trivial to split these up - `git add` separate files, or `git add -p` when you only want to stage some of the changes in a file. This leads to cleaner commits.

I've heard people decry this, saying that you should be testing each individual state of your codebase. git being the powerful sonuvabitch it is, you can do that:

* `git stash --keep-index` will store away all of your modifications, other than the ones you're getting ready to commit. Run your tests, commit, `git stash pop`.
* Checking out different revisions and running tests isn't a bad option, either, whether you use `git bisect` or do it manually. With the amazing power of `git rebase -i`[0], you can easily fix any little issues without disrupting other commits.

[0]: http://schacon.github.com/history.html

You will change their SHA1 sums, so they'll become different commits. This isn't a problem, though, if you haven't pushed them up to a shared repository.
When looking into a candidates work do any of the other platforms or services come to mind at all or is it solely Github that you check?
The 90% of streaming video claim is utterly false - it's at least 54% and climbing very fast. If we're going to do this, let's at least not just make stuff up.

(http://www.loopinsight.com/2010/10/27/54-of-web-video-is-now...)

The closed platform argument is perfectly valid, but has nothing to do with whether we're moving into the world of Post PC devices or not.

It's pretty obvious that we're never going to get away from the PC era if we have to drag along all of the legacy.

Why not list things like "run windows apps" and "run gnome" for good measure?
The FSF actually says that, to comply with the GPL, you must distribute full source, not diffs.

http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#DistributingSourceI...
Smallville Season 10 Episode 16
American television series adapted from the DC comics and produced by Alfred Gough and Miles Millar, on Smallville Season 10 Episode 16 will show the fight between Lionel and Tess, this fight took place on behalf of LuthorCorp. Smallville Season 10 Ep 16, directed by Al Septien,while Smallville S10E16 story was written by Al Septien together with Turi Meyer.
I hate to ask, but did you actually click "Render"? Just clearing away the text that is in the middle when you first load it has exactly that result if you don't click "Render", which is why I ask. It was also non-obvious to me that when I changed fractal types, I had to click "Recompile"; everything else updated live, so I expected that to as well.
That depends on your traffic. It includes one worker.
This is an obscenity. I remember leaving my 486/33 running for an hour or two to render something at 800x600x256color, and now I'm flying through Mandelbulbs on a web browser, fiddling with them in real time. Excuse me, futureshock moment here.
I believe it. But that's not the same as "it's not a viable strategy".
TBH I'm more interested in the social impact evidence of alien life would have, rather than the scientific one.

Evidence of panspermia early in Earth's history would be interesting, but I am not sure it would actually teach us much. OTOH there would be significant implications for some major religions.
Is there a way to dump or export all my data from Last.fm, all at once?
The Reds vs. The Red Devils
Programming is a lot like learning to run. It takes about a year for a baby to walk; and another 2 before they learn how to run. In another 4 years (age 7) most kids are fairly good at running. Programming takes years of practice to get good at it.

Another analogy. Poetry & Programing have a lot in common. Once you learn to write it, creation is easy; good creations take practice & skill. Iteration is key.
What is this garbage?
While the idea of Diaspora is nice and all, I'm not going to start using it until someone convinces me that I don't need to audit every code change. Removing commit access for all of the core developers would be a fantastic start.

For those who aren't aware of the issues[0] that were revealed several months ago, Diaspora's devs made some rudimentary security mistakes. Yes, it's an alpha, but as pointed out in the HN thread (which I did not save, and am too lazy to search for), this was basic security - the stuff you have to keep in mind from the start, not stick on later.

[0]: http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/09/22/security-lessons-learned...
Thanks for bringing this up - why couldn't you book a flight on hipmunk?
Wow, very poor research.

Try on Tripadvisor: http://is.gd/ozrUCd

Vs. on Oyster: http://www.oyster.com/auto/suggestions/?q=puerto+escondido,+...

Try a bunch of other nice spots that Oyster doesn't have any suggestions for yet, but that TripAdvisor has plenty of info on. The only fault I find with TripAdvisor is they don't have pretty URLs so I had to use a URL shortener.
What you're missing is that const is a compile time validation. The compiler _does_ compute whether or not the function you've created is const automatically and uses that to give you an error when it conflicts with what you've told it to expect. This is a way of validating your code's assumptions.

It is slightly annoying that you do need to declare const in functions ahead of time, but it ensures that if you say "this function wont change the variable" your compiler will make sure that you dont. And no amount of changing the internals of that function will change that assertion.
Cute but not terribly fun.
Has Evidence for Alien Life Been Found?
Worse is better. http://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html

From the point of view of practical developer productivity, static typing is about tool support. Especially the all-mighty "list of stuff actually relevant after I hit the '.' key," all other tools being mere footnotes to the weeping tiger blood tears of this tools win.

Catching type errors at compile time is great as long as it doesn't fk up your API too much, but it's a far second to tools when it comes to getting sh*t done.
The growth in knowledge is dependent on how much brain power there is. Everything we do is subject to improvement by anyone that cares to analyze and innovate.

In the scenarios of those against technology 50 years ago, they also could not see how the economy would evolve or how people would adapt. But that lack of vision isn't proof that they were right.
I hesitated before including Google Code. I believe that it technically meets the qualifications of the features mentioned in the 7 ways list, but it really falls short of both BitBucket and GitHub in terms of its feeling of being a social code site. I guess Google Code is more optimized for searching, rather than sharing -- which makes a certain amount of sense, given its creation by the king of search, but results in a site that simply doesn't draw my interest as much as BitBucket.
Haha I love it, 4chan as a spam testing tool.
Progress comes not from the action of modifying the tool, but from adoption of the modification by those who it benefits (in a maximally holistic sense)

I find the distinction you make between "appliances" and "tools" to be non-existent - everything is an appliance at some level, and all tools are opinionated at some level.
Best paper awards
Ask HN: Recurring revenue by a yearly subscription
I put up a small video sire where I am getting 100 unique visitors per day. My wife things I should earn a few bucks from the site since we pay $175 a month to provide the site with good bandwidth as well as I do buy equipment periodically as well.

She thought an idea like Shazam where you can view, say 10 videos free per month or pay a fee for unlimited access.

Charging $1.99/year is small, 1,000 subscribers would give me a decent amount of money to buy some boxes to load balance, etc.

Charging $4.99/year is still small, but I think less users would sign up compared to a cheaper price.

I am reminded that someone once told me: "Working for peanuts is still peanuts..."

Can anyone shed some light on subscription models? Monthly, yearly, limits imposed unless you pay...personal experience...
Apple is using the popularity of its mobile devices to turn its consumer electronic customers into media distribution customers.

It makes good sense for Apple - an iPad owner is a customer for maybe 3 years, but get the same user locked into iTunes, and that's a multi-decade revenue stream. Media distribution is the real game for Apple.
Any good links? On http://setformarriage.com we've gotten rid of about 95% of spam by using CloudFlare, country blocking, and the Facebook Registration Tool, but it sure would be nice to get that last 5% down as small as possible.
SEO is tough in the web app market, but if you're a content based website

There is no rule that says you can't sell a web application with a content-based website. I mean, if you're using AdWords, you're essentially outsourcing the production of content leading into your landing pages to the more efficient content farms, who will get X level of results with pages tangentially related to your product festooned with ads (including your's and competitors'). Why not write the content yourself, make the quality a few notches above "How To Boil Water", leave off the competition's ads, and pay for the content once as opposed to leasing traffic from it monthly?
>It's not 'purposefully broken', and your brother wasn't giving you the 'party line' – he was relaying a fact.

The fact is that 'some motherboards cannot supply the voltage' or is it 'it needs its own driver to charge' ?

>To charge over USB, Apple had break the USB spec without compromising compatibility or destroying existing USB peripherals

>If you'd installed Apple's drivers in your XP instance, things would have worked fine.

So they purposefully broke the spec (looks like compatibility WAS compromised, wasn't it) by having a USB connector but not allowing all USB ports to charge it.

What about the USB ports at airports, in car adaptors, heck, even the otherwise useless one on my Comcast DVR?

So they couldn't make the iPad detect insufficient voltage and show 'Insufficient voltage detected. You need to install iTunes to charge me!'

Or maybe charge at a slower pace and show a message to that effect?

It's not as if it's an edge case seen by few, probably ~50% of iPad users might be connecting it to Windows PCs.
Jessica,

What is your media secret? You have been featured by Inc like 10 times this year already.
Best way to connect with developers?
Guys, what would you say is the best way to connect with developers. I am the business type that has the money but not the team of developers to get my start up off the ground. I am looking for developers that would be interested in an equity stake for creating a web and mobile platform business. Looking for any advice,

DK
Indeed, disappointing...
Open information systems (the internet) leads to all sorts of changes in closed system (Middle Eastern governments, State Departments, the FBI). The internet is fun again.
If you get accepted at Stanford or Harvard, then go! Even if you later drop out to start a Facebook or Google, or play pro golf, you'll still be considered an alumni for LIFE. The $10M will come and go faster than you think. And selling a biz for such a low amount is really nothing to brag about.
I would think the good teachers feel just as fired and disrespected as the average and bad teachers. They're not being treated as individuals.
Liverpool vs Manchester United live
watch Liverpool and Manchester United<br>Liverpool vs Manchester United Video<br>Watch Manchester United vs Liverpool live HD<br>Manchester United vs Liverpool online<br>http://wayfortop.blogspot.com/2011/03/liverpool-vs-manchester-united-live.html
Somebody should port Duke Nukem 3D to WebGL.

The original game has been open source since 2003 (https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Duke_Nukem_3D...)
Perhaps some concrete examples instead of abstractions and theories would help.
Looks gorgeous. Would you be willing to list everything you need to know (as a beginning programmer) to be able to build something like this?

Look forward to your blog post!
That's not really the reason, and I believe it's even stated in the PEP.