skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I wish the author of this piece the very best with his squirrel restaurant franchise.

Seriously, what the hell is this guy going on about? The fact that large companies that create huge ecosystems also create cookie-cutter ways of doing things? And this is bad?

I've coded in just about everything out there except Haskell and Lisp. I've worked with heavy web-centric systems, distributed systems, P2P systems, and so on. I've written drivers, shell extensions, and rules-based database applications. And yes, it's true, I'm moving more to linux and F# on mono lately. But that's because of licensing and scaling issues, not because the .NET stack is somehow defective. In fact, if .NET were a liability, I would very quickly jump into something else. But it's not.

It's also true that there are a LOT of .NET developers who understand the cookie-cutter approach and can't go outside a very small comfort zone. But that's a product of being the world-wide standard, not a product of something gone wrong. When you own the game, hundreds of thousands of folks are going to go through 6-week "learn .NET!" courses and come out the other end button-pushers. If anything, those guys are a sign of a mature market, which is a good thing.

And what's this about .NET being a language? He acts like this entire system is similar to what? Javascript? .NET is a platform which runs dozens of languages with hundreds of thousands of easily pluggable libraries. If you're coding C++ in .NET writing unmanaged code you're doing something completely different from some guy dragging and dropping controls on a web page in VB.NET

This article shows the worst thing about all of us as programmers: we tend to run on assuming that we are experts in areas where we have the slimmest idea of what the hell we are actually talking about.

In fact, I feel this article is so bad that it has to be a joke: a poke with a sharp stick just to incite a lot of invective comments, like this one. Fricking linkbait. Bah.
http://technologizer.com/2011/03/25/is-samsungs-new-galaxy-t...

A little suspicious to announce that the revised-before-shipping 10.1" tablet is millimeters thinner than the new iPad, and a similarly-tiny bit lighter... like maybe those specs were set by management and then they're gonna hope engineering can figure out how to make it happen? Compounded by them not showing the "new" one powered on at all. But to show these apparently-empty prototypes right next to the "old" ones (that actually power on and which were apparently going to be fine to ship until the moment Apple's iPad 2 spec page went up) seems embarrassingly tacky.
Personally, I think Google should break itself up. It needs to treat it's search & ads business totally differently than it treats it's other "startup-ish" properties. These can/should be launched under different branding, or, like a startup, each could be launched under it's own discrete branding.

I'm not sure it really matters if a site is "developed by Googlers". Why do the users care? If Google is playing farovitism with results, then it's probably important to disclose that, but otherwise, just let startups be startups.
I'm going to keep my response brief: 1) .NET is not a language, and calling it such is just silly. 2) I've built everything from insanely high-performance emulators (IronBabel) to kernels (Renraku) to computer vision applications (not announced yet) using .NET; all of these are "1.7oz burgers", and all of them were performant, flexible, and easy to build.

Troll, troll, troll...
> Isn't Darwin open source in the same way Android is?

Not really. Android is a complete system, with a kernel, libraries and the whole GUI on top of that. Darwin is just the kernel, and I think they've sort of phased out doing much with the 'open source' aspect of it.
First of all, what flamebait but I'll bite

"Even worse, every day spent learning a Microsoft kitchen takes TWO days to unlearn, meaning once you get a reasonable way down the .NET career path, there is almost no going back."

That's not true in my experience.

I work at small, profitable company using Linux / Python / Amazon Web Services, we have some fantastic developers who came from a pure .NET background - some worked at Microsoft.

They transitioned successfully because of their attitude. If you commit yourself to learning the tools and not fighting them, you can make the transition in a couple months - no problem.
Car and aerospace companies went down this path for many years before geeks. I get the feeling the logo for the Cherokee web server probably is not going to be loved by the tribe. Given what has been going on with NCAA teams, I would seriously consider changing it or getting definite permission.

I do wonder why more geeks weren't offended that Google Voice blocked one of tribal community colleges? Perhaps even one used for the name of a product (AT&T never did says which one it was). I can't help but think what would have happened if someone had not lost an opportunity because of it.
George Clooney moonlighting for ShoutEm | ShoutEm
I'm not sure these technology-based analyses are correct. I had four teenagers at the time and they all switched from MySpace to Facebook because the MySpace pages got cluttered with glaring ads. The Facebook layout was cleaner and had no ads (at the time). There was no problem with site speed.
The Startup Visa Act: An Immigrant's Perspective
Incremental progress in vision has useful applications, so it's worth pursuing even if it isn't the best way to approach general AI. However, I think recent progress in emulating the visual cortex (search for "sparse coding") is the most exciting advance in AI in years, and I wouldn't be at all surprised if it leads the way to a more general understanding of the brain and ultimately strong AI.
Kodak wants $1B in royalties revenue from Apple, RIM
at least i gave my point for that reason :)
Although I agree with some of your points, Google's cluster management system is years ahead of everyone else. It just makes so much more sense for that thing to exist given the wide heterogeneous workload at Google.

It is so much easier at Google to design something for scalability (which Google is mostly about) than at other companies, mostly thanks to the policies and infrastructures you criticized.

It is easy to just criticize without considering the implications of alternative policies.

For example, re: Switch to team-based distributed source control
I've worked at a pretty large software company that does this. The problem is lots of teams are working on similar things and results in duplicated effort.
No it doesn't. The _typical_ apache user doesn't modify the Apache source or even compile it him/herself.
API downtime: Who’s asleep at the wheel?
I think it's unfortunate an article like this even gets up-votes on Hacker News.
Adaptive testing techniques for software
Capistrano and Deprec can help with this stuff. Should come up in a quick Google search. It does use Ruby, but you can use it with PHP and anything else you want to. Deprec has recipes for setting up the entire LAMP stack.
Once I used it for a complete day I didn't notice. It changes gradually enough that it isn't obvious unless you are thinking about it. Only problem I had was that, at least on Mac (Guns of Icarus), I'd jump into a game and not realize for a while that the color was not right or too dark due to Flux.
This should be a giant red flag to anyone who is considering working at Expensify (as long as this CEO is around). I see this "we're hiring the best developers in the world" mentality from time to time at small startups and honestly it borders on delusional. You write software which makes expense reports and you've made some money. You aren't working on anything that would interest one of the best developers in the world and I seriously doubt you're prepared to pay what it takes to employ one.

We all know that working in .Net means about as much as a carpenter using a saw. Drawing conclusions from it is just another example of very poor reasoning skills.

In the end this is just linkbait and I hope the CEO apologizes publicly for making a poor decision in publishing it.
And sometimes, those ebooks dont exist for a physical copy. At least in the computer related fields, a physical book is good when the electricity is down, and a ebook is good for grep.

Yes, I am a "pirate" if by that you mean I havent paid twice: one for physical and one for digital. And dont get me started on DRM....
Sorry for the dupes. Was pretty excited to share this one. New to me and quite useful.
Sidenote: Linode will do 32bit images, which so far, has been proven to lower the memory needs of some processes. SliceHost/Rackspace Cloud only run 64bit images, AFAIK, unless this has been resolved since I last checked. You also get 512mb at Linode vs 256mb at SliceHost for the same cost.

Learning curve is steep, I'll agree, but totally worth the investment in learning. When it gets to be a pain, hopefully your business model allows for you to hire someone to handle day to day operations. :)
Pacer, a ruby implementation of the Gremlin graph traversal language
what i've done recently is give a text field a worthless class, then use javascript to change it's class to a display:none. Sure bots may execute the javascript however it causes them to run much slower so I'd think the majority of them aren't.
In the past he's pretty much said straight out he doesn't understand it. You can take that a couple of different ways. I doubt he's a technophobe, but I wouldn't be surprised if he didn't really understand the difference between, say, an application and and operating system.
Agreed. It was my first HN contribution, so please be a little indulgent. I'm still getting the hang of it.
I agree that NLP is no less AI than vision. What I wanted to point out in my post (I am the author) is that too many smart computer vision researchers don't view vision as AI at all. Somehow many people's research program is centered around the assumption/desire that a pure image classification approach will solve vision.
I will definitely spend some time there too.Thank you
Groupon: No, Our Revenue Didn't Just Fall Off A Cliff
"Kelso, did you ever FINISH Lord of the Flies ?"
I'm pretty sure trademark protection only affects the domain that it's trademarked in. On the link below by personalcompute, it's the "Goods and Services". So that means you can still use the word color in normal use, but I'd be cautious of saying "there's a lot of color in that facebook photo".
AppSumo.com Raises Round with a Top Angel
Why do you have Google ads on your app store? it looks cheap and I dont think its worth it for you guys.
That means it's been approved
The GPLv3 doesn't require you to support custom builds. It just requires you to let people use them. The code doesn't have to be signed at the hardware level. Heck, all you have to do is replace the splash screen on bootup with a "warning unsigned code detected, this device may have been compromised."

And as far as supporting any code, most manufacturers of processors do in fact support running any code you like on them. Especially the dominant Intel-compatible personal computer, where Apple themselves support running any operating system you like.
Well I'd argue Warren has bought into tech, just physical delivery tech, not pure software tech. This is understandable tech.

Particularly I'm thinking of Iscar, who use some of the most advanced manufacturing techniques to make special tools for metal working. It would be hard to argue that this company don't very heavily leverage software, to the point where is part of their product.

http://www.iscar.com/

MiTek is another company, who specifically sell engineering software, along with building technology: connectors, joists, beams, roofing etc.

www.mitek.com
Stackoverflow has a tiny fraction of the traffic MySpace had when it was relevant. I bet it has a fraction of its traffic now.
Actually, I'm surprised no one else touched on this part yet:

See, experience is cheap. All it takes is time. Skill is harder, but really only requires hard work — a lot of people can get that. But attitude. You either have it, or you don’t.

So, what he's saying is, experience is cheap, hard work is cheap (seriously???), but attitude, now that's worth something? I think I see the point about his programmers beating up everyone else's.

I say, let him have all the attitude he can choke on. I'll settle for the hard work and experience, thankuveddymuch!
I think a great first place for him, or anyone, who actually cares about this, would be to make sure to understand the difference between .NET the framework and the .NET languages. The framework has features at many levels of abstractions, and yes, the higher up you get, the less likely you are to see eye to eye with the developers, but there's always a lower level, and at the bottom, you absolutely can fiddle with the bits on a network connection or whatever else he mentions.
I live in soma and would love to find a place to hack. find me on twitter. @jdavid
While vision might not be the best avenue for studying general purpose intelligence, it is worthwhile to think of vision as more related to hard AI and less of a problem of applied machine learning.

I think once vision researchers understand just how close they are to hardcore AI, they will realize that there is a plethora of knowledge (not all visual) about the world that can be used to create better object recognition systems.

-Tomasz (blog post author)
I actually edit photos even while Flux is on. Eyes are amazing things; mine adjust to the new white balance and I can still judge colors reasonably well (ok, as well as I could before). Of course, these are just photos for Flickr, not for professional work, but when I compare the ones edited with Flux on and with Flux off, I can't tell the difference. In other words, might be worth a try anyway.
Amazon did well. It's easy to stay alive, in a bubble or not: just forget the buzzwordy bullshit and build a business with a viable business model from day one. Unless all you want is to raise funding and have fun for some time, that is :)
I would have thought their government would have been intelligent enough to go for a slow changes over lots of time and no killing protesters. I guess not. I wonder if the king will survive and/or throw the rest of the government under the buss in an attempt to survive?
This problem will be addressed in an upcoming release with live demo functionality so you can get accustomed to the application and determine if it suits your needs. Thanks for the feedback!
Sorry, but usually idea is worth virtually nothing. Having been a technical co-founder before and now the business founder, I've been on both sides of the coin. Unless you have actually built a profitable business before, it's very hard to justify the value that you bring to the table.

The technical co-founder already has experience and pretty much knows the issues he's going to face, and how he's going to handle them. If you haven't built a business before, then you do not know the issues that you'll face or how you're going to handle them. So his value probably far outweighs yours, even though it's your idea.
My comment is very tribalist in nature( e.g. my region is superior to your region ), and I fully expected the downvotes.

Regardless, it does reflect much of what I see in the insular SF startup culture, even if it's based entirely on my anecdotal evidence.
you just have to contact them and they'll provide you the full source code.

Absolutely false. You have to be part of their inner circle of Super Best Friends, which costs a lot of money, and they don't accept everyone.
I really doubt the MS stack had anything to do with it. I think it's more of case of a combination of a different online social shift (from scrapbooking to social circle behavior tracking) and resting on your laurels (e.g. refusing to evolve before Facebook became dominant).

In their defence, what Facebook stumbled upon was really simple and yet very non-obvious (at least initially).
Not exactly. It got solved by a lot of changes to the underlying storage structure.
How To Boost Your Wireless Signal
Ouch! So much for showing my enthusiasm to Demo Day.
I do appreciate the behind the scene look at Demo Day. The energy must be electrifying. For now all I can do is live vicariously through these post. Please keep them coming.
Know your nukes: understanding radiation risks in Japan
I worked at MySpace, specifically the middle tier where these technical issues supposedly existed (scalability), although I also worked on a number of user and non-user facing projects during my time there. You may consider me biased because of that, but I'd say I also have a pretty good view into the issue. The reason for MySpace's downfall is crystal clear to anyone who worked at the company and cared to look around and make sense of what was happening - it was catastrophic lack of leadership and vision in management and product, paralyzing political infighting, and general lack of competence at the top levels of the company's management. The people making the decisions would change their mind and requirements constantly because of this. There were numerous entire features that were simply not launched and abandoned AFTER they were completed because the management couldn't agree on how they wanted to "position them" (and they were great features). The top management level was in a constant state of political infighting, and that most likely came from fox and the way they ran shit. There was no one to judge and reward competence at that level, it was simply about who could cover their ass better or come out looking better. MySpace was huge, and everyone just wanted a piece of the pie.

One of the issues that stemmed from this was lack of respect for technology in the sense that no one at the higher levels saw the company as a technology company. They saw it as an entertainment or media company. That created the cultural problems on down that eventually contributed to bad products and shoddy implementation.

Now, the core technical part of the organization was actually extremely competent. MySpace was pushing more traffic than Google at one point in its heyday, and the site scaled just fine then. That wasn't an accident, I have worked with some of the smartest people in the industry there. But because tech wasn't the point for executives, those people were tightly controlled by non-technical management, and so products suffered.

MySpace could (and still can) scale anything, to say that they had a scaling problems by the time they got to their peak is complete gibberish. Over the years they have developed a very mature technology stack. No one knows about it because it's entirely proprietary. The problem was management and product that was basically... incompetent, and lacked anyone at the proper levels who would care to see and fix it.

EDIT: Some typos and missed words. I'm sure still missed some.
The funny ones?
I actually respect that. While facebook brags about their "social graph" (IE: A list of friends they don't do anything with), friendster tried to take on the hard CS problems.
Sure they failed, but they were never fake about it. And they were one of the first.
.NET is a pretty good implementation of a Better Java. It doesn't even suffer from some of the cultural problems of Java. (FooDelegatorHandleFactorySingleton...)

It is a thoroughly corporate ecosystem, though. The vast majority of .NET programmers are work-a-day IT department developers. There is a lot of deference to MS on tools, language features, and libraries. MS developers will tend to wait for MS to incorporate something into the official platform rather than creating open-source projects to fill the same need. (eg. ASP.NET MVC) Even Java is better in this regard. It's hard to imagine something like Clojure emerging from the .NET community.
I may be incinerated for saying this, but maybe stupid decisions are a symptom of the incompetence that doomed MySpace to failure.

Let the big karma fire begin.

edit: somewhere else someone mentioned they used Cold Fusion. I consider that another stupid decision. But at least they were migrating out of it.
Nortel gets US$7.5M in Microsoft web address sale
"Now let me clarify - .NET is a dandy language"

Why I don't listen to CEOs.
"Noteleaf is great, but it can’t tell you why you’re meeting somebody or whether it’s a poor use of your time."

This is somewhat orthogonal to the meaning of the conclusion, but maybe they could track that somehow. Add some kind of "why" description when you create a meeting and then afterwards allow you to rate it on usefulness?
Design Hacks for the Pragmatic Minded
Probably a good tool, but: I would avoid using a computer at all for an hour before going to sleep. For me, reading a book or Kindle is OK, but staring at a laptop screen has a bad effect on my sleep.

I'll give Flux a try however when I absolutely need to power on my laptop before trying to go to sleep.
Two points. First, yes you are getting screwed. I pay developers in south asia more than you are getting paid here in the US. Please no flaming about that - it's relevant because the cost of living is so vastly different between US and (e.g.) India.

Second, some negotiation advice. Don't ask for a significant raise until you have a second offer. Negotiation is all about the BATNA (google it), and from what I've read, you don't have one. So go get one first, then negotiate.
Is Apple Too Quick To Shut Down Potentially Hacked Accounts?
So you have defined faith as the thing that fills the gap between the amount of confidence we can reasonably have in a proposition based on evidence/knowledge and the amount of confidence we would like to have. Let me be the first to rush to the common ground here, as I believe this to be a useful definition.

Some things in this world require larger doses of faith, like whether or not God exists.

Exactly. To put an even finer point on it, it would also take a great amount of faith to confidently assert that there are dragons in your basement.
The differences are much more involved: learning as part of a startup, especially if you have debt, is learning under duress. Learning while on a job, when the issue of the next paycheck doesnt loom over you, is a more steady process
This post is so spot-on, I wouldn't be surprised if it gets pulled. NDA violation galore.
Haha. Excellent point about HTML programmers.

Also, it's probably fair to say that as a whole programmers are 'largely' not used to thinking or working in a way that's productive at scale. I didn't argue otherwise.

I just suggested that the percentage of developers in the .NET community who are aligned with values, knowledge, and experience essential to scaling a large site.. is smaller than many other platforms... Yes, I'd argue smaller than all of the ones you mentioned.
Apple Wins Trade Ruling in Nokia Patent Fight Over Phones
I had exactly the same experience on the iphone. I guess you have to be with a group of people all using the app for it to make sense? If so, they need to communicate it much more clearly!
It's a step up from the non-geeks. At least you didn't give them typhus-infected blankets.

Really, how many times do you think of "Massachusetts" or "Detroit" or "Delaware" as American Indian tribes and not states/cities/metonyms.
Pimping your Angellist profile: A session with AngelPad
I'm amazed what google's been doing all along hasn't caused this kind of reaction.

Throwing a source dump over the wall to out of date code has always been their operating procedure, but they've never publicly stated, as bald-faced as they have now, that they're not going to be releasing the source because they don't want smaller ODMs to have access to it.

This has nothing to do with hobbyist devs, this has everything to do with keeping Honeycomb limited to the few companies that have paid Google hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars for that access.

The rest of the manufacturers aren't "worthy".
How a false start could help us win
How many games have you released in that year?