skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
All right, I'll finally comment on Agile (personal perspective, not newsworthy of itself).

A few years ago, one of the "big name" proponents of Agile and whatnot came to the area, and I let a few people know and we went to listen. [1]

It was nothing more than a buzzword laden rehash: Part common sense, part a rephrasing of the same old corporate mumbo jumbo we'd all long since learned to ignore where we can, and tolerate where we must.

On top of it, he was an arrogant prick -- at least, that day. The people I was with were generally quite intelligent and rather conscientious. Some tried to ask questions, especially to get past the buzzwords to the gist of the topic. His responses basically ran along the lines: "You're doing it wrong." This as a preface -- as an assumption, not even acknowledging the details the person described. Then, more 'blah blah buzzwords' lead to "blah blah metrics'.

It felt like a verbalized extension of PowerPoint (IIRC, he had PowerPoint along for the ride, too).

After that, I stopped paying much attention to articles on "agile". There's some good value in some of the details, but trust your common sense, and that you've probably already figured out most of the basics for yourself.

Also, I'll add that different people have different working styles. Exhibit some trust that they have figured out, at least to some extent, what works for them. Then stop trying to pound them into that proverbial "round hole".

Yes, people have to communicate effectively. But this does not equate with e.g. shoving them all into a "bullpen". Or making them think all day with someone staring over their shoulder, or vise versa.

As for e.g. continuous builds/integration and all the other technical aspects. Some good portion of that is an outgrown of continued developments in various systems. I suppose "agile" publicizes these, but you should be aware of and considering them, regardless.

[1] I guess I should add that he worked for IBM, IIRC. So, of course, they were there to promote "agile" in a manner that would sell IBM products and services.

My experience may therefore relate more to how agile translates to the world of larger corporations. By the time its transmogrified by all those filters, it sounds a lot like more of the "same old same old".

YMMV
Want To Work For A Hot North Carolina startup?
"was in retaliation for his constitutionally protected criticism of his employer."

Is there any question why this guy was really fired? I will never understand why people seem to think they can criticize their employers and then sue after they're fired for doing so.

People, you can get fired from a job for almost any reason at all. You are not entitled to a job. Sure, badmouthing your employer is "free speech", but they are also free to fire you for doing the badmouthing.

In this case they used his browsing history as justification for the firing, but if not that, it would have been for something else sooner or later. He simply had it coming.
The flip side of this is that "management hell" of large companies beats it into you that it's better to ask for forgiveness than permission. Official channels are the path of most resistance.

Programmer: "Hey, we could really use a wiki/hudson server/maven repository/whatever to ease the pain on some of this stuff, can we get a box stood up?"

Manager: "The sysadmins are already overextended, I'll look into it, but don't hold your breath"

12 months later: Still no tool.

You only play that game once or twice before you just stop asking and just start doing, or you brush up your resume and move on.
I thought killing meetings was a good thing.
Start an Informational Product Business — Step by Step Guide
I had a similar first reaction. But then I realized this was talking about thing(s) that make meetings as useless as they are. My next thought was "well, what you can do about it is not have the meeting" :)
Which, to me, seems to be an admission that the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology isn't actually a scientific journal. An initial experiment/study is only a part of the process. If you get extraordinary results out of an experiment, but no one else sees the same results with the same experiment, well, something was up with your run of it. It is vital to the body of scientific knowledge that re-runs of published experiments are performed, recorded, and published. Otherwise, there's no way to know whether the original result was real or a fluke (or fraudulent).
It depends on what you're doing within the loop. With a for loop, you still have to perform an array lookup. For something simple, like summing up all the numbers in an array, forEach is definitely faster. Try JSLitmus'ing it.
Are people really concerned about this? The entire notion of pirates taking off with a nuclear barge is absurd.

First, moving a 472 ft barge through the water is not something that occurs quickly. Even if pirates were able to gain control of such a reactor, a military response would be so swift and overpowering that they'd be lucky to make it a few miles (at an optimistic 12 knots) before intercept and certain doom.

Next, you can bet that these nuclear barges would be some of the most watched maritime objects in the world. We wouldn't need to worry about the Russian's watching and securing them, because US spy satellites and a desk of 5 "analysts" will be providing briefs on the status of these reactors to national security advisors daily.

Finally, every first-rate military in the world has dedicated billions of dollars to the problem of naval attack weapons. A pirate effort has about zero chance of making it within several hundred miles of shore. A nation whose borders are facing a nuclear threat wouldn't even need to waste an anti-ship missile. A Super Hornet cruises at around 600 MPH. Even just a strafing run with 20mm cannon fire would obliterate any pirate tow vessel.

The notion of a nuclear barge as a high-value terrorist target is absolutely absurd.
Please please please please don't let this happen. Intel appears to be what made Apple viable for a lot of people, especially in the enterprise. Specifically, full-speed Windows in a VM or BootCamp.

It may be something we never actually use, but having that parachute is something I'm superstitious about losing. Never mind the return of the Whose is Bigger CPU wars.
What you're describing is often considered to be good code.
Maintainability is quite often the most important thing when it comes to coding. Cryptic code, though sometimes a tad bit harder to understand, is often preferable when it substantially increases the performance of the application. Short, descriptive comments do the rest of the work for the maintainer.
Hmm... I just tried fresh FF4 and the settings window came up right away for me. Do you see "Buylater settings" in the Tools menu? If not can you email me your "Troubleshooting information" (under Help -> Troubleshooting information) to raph@buylatr.com? Sorry about that.
Good Reader seems to use a web server to allow you to upload documents, so I don't think this is an issue.
I could think of a better place to mail whistle blowing material - namely John Young.
What's funniest is that if you look closely at the Speedtest.Net image, Google only gets a 3 1/2 star rating. No one is ever happy I guess.
I live in Colombia, ask me anything.
I honestly believe that you should avoid multithread support and instead focus on the current single threaded reactor pattern.
Any developer found easily just attach something like a zmq ipc queue in order to support multithreaded handling, given that the request object is thread safe.
This approach would just leave you with work which ensures that the protocol parser doesn't trump any I/O overhead.

This looks very cool, thank you for sharing.
> Go beating Python in time to code?

Yes, that's what they tell me. Among other reasons, static typing means catching programmer errors faster.
My experience exactly. I tried writing my own script and it didn't work, and then I loaded the demo script and it didn't work. I think a screencast would be nice even if it never gets broken again.
Show HN: Hubski: part blog, part news-aggregator, part social-feed.
Hubski is designed around the concept of sharing topically-broad, thoughtful discussion. In functionality, Hubski is part news-aggregator, part blogging-platform and part social-feed.

Up front, Hubski looks and works most like a news aggregator, like HN. Hubski enables you to tag each post with a hashtag, and to follow tags and other users. Doing so builds your own personalized ‘hubfeed’ composed of the kind of content you like.

To make sharing less dependent on the frontpage and voting, users can ‘hub’ a post they like, which sends it to the hubfeeds of their followers. This works like retweeting in Twitter, as posts can spread between people that want to share content.

Furthermore, to foster the submission of content rich posts, text can be posted with links, links are active in the text, and urls of images and videos are embedded. Your submissions to Hubski constitute your ‘hub’, which is similar in format to a blog. I now use my hub as a blog actually: http://hubski.com/hub?id=mk

The Karma system for Hubski is currency-based. Karma is spent on votes and converted into Clout which cannot be spent. A small amount of Karma is granted each day that you interact on the site. The more Clout and Followers you have, the more Karma that is granted to you. A 5-point (+ to +++++) grading system allows users to see the general value of a post or comment, but only owners of posts can see the actual score.

Hubski has been up for a couple of months, and we have a small but energetic group which is having a good time of it.

Although Hubski is just getting underway, current use has given me some direction for future development. I am working on the inter-user connections at the moment. It’s my goal to increase the ability to share and find good conversation with people you appreciate, while making it easy to keep noise to a minimum. My pal calls Hubski “The thinking-man’s Twitter”. -IMHO, that’s the highest compliment it’s been paid.

Please have a look for yourself. And feedback would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance!

BTW, I have been programming for about 6 months now. I decided I wanted to build my own apps, and started with Hubski. Yes, it’s built in Arc on top of the HN source code. I submitted it to HN about 6 weeks ago, but it really wasn’t ready for prime time, and I have done quite a bit of work on it since then.

http://hubski.com
Indeed, and the HN title is wrong.
I think you can avoid nesting finally thus:

X x = null;
Y y = null;
try{
x = foo();
y = bar();
yadda(x,y);
} finally {
if (x!=null) x.dispose();
if (y!=null) y.dispose();
}
Ask HN: How to receive recognition or credit for self-learned material?
I've been studying on my own for awhile now from great resources like the MIT OCW offerings, Stanford series of lectures on Youtube, and great content from places like Berkeley, Princeton, Harvard's CS50.tv, UNSW, and other places online.

I've learned a ton starting from basically 0 programming and algorithm experience to being farely competent in a few languages, design patterns and algorithms, as well as the math that I've missed for awhile. I'm currently self-learning Discrete Maths with OCW, Khan Academy, and books from the library.

I learn in my free time and it's been amazing. For support, I often use OpenStudy.com's amazing community, especially for math and computer science things. I'm planning on ramping up my experience and practice by starting to participate in open source projects (the folks at #openhatch on freenode and openhatch.org have been amazing here), as well as getting a portfolio of projects on github.

I've run into sort of a conundrum that I knew I'd have to face sooner or later -- how exactly do I receive recognition and get credit for what I've been learning for the last couple of years? I could always put it under education and experience on my resume, but are there pointers that people on HN can give on how exactly I can prove I know and learned the things I say I have?

I really appreciate that we live in a time where anyone can get a world-class education for free (almost all in the local public library and free time at home/after work) from some of the best institutions in the world like this. Even better (imho) is the amazing help and collaboration provided by the OpenStudy and OpenHatch communities.
Why Red Hat Is Wrong That It's Better To Just Pay Patent Trolls Sometimes
Completely offtopic, but every time I open one of your articles, my first point of focus goes on to the photo on the side. Was this intentional or an accident?

It's really cool though, normally I don't pay attention to who wrote an article, and just skim through to see if it's interesting. Here, the initial focus on the photo reminds me that you're a very good blogger, based on other articles that you've written in the past and grabs my complete focus right away.
And there actually is an idiomatic way to avoid the problem in Ruby:

File.open("...") do |f|
firstline = f.readline
... stuff that might throw an exception ...
end

If the "stuff" throws an exception, the file gets closed automatically. And while File is a library class, it's getting no special favors here --- any pure ruby library can easily implement similar APIs, and ActiveRecord's connection pool, for example, actually does.
They didn't this morning, from my iPad. It can be they do device/browser detection, but they don't tell you that. Now, from my browser they indeed ask for a picture.
Also, Go gets this right with "defer", and with mostly deterministic error handling (panicking is not the normal way to signal an error, returning a status is).
The Sputnik Observatory is filled with videos similar to TED, in a very innovative interface:

http://www.sptnk.org

The videos are shorter, but the site tries to link you to similarly interesting conversations, and hopefully expose you to something you weren't aware of. It's also growing rapidly, and will have a lot more video up in the next couple of months!
Phew, I thought we were talking about the chip for a minute!
TL;DR it's powerpoint.
Google Introduces Service That Shows Users the Inside of Local Businesses
I'll be answering questions throughout the day today, starting at 12:00 PM EST.
I usually can't get those kinds of speeds from most of my servers in datacenters generally.

Speedtest uses servers in the same city, and game downloads probably do as well (CDNs) but the average case is likely significantly slower.
There is nothing wrong with asking myopic questions. The author did not state that startups are the only thing that are important; they asked a specific question about a specific issue.
How do you get rich
Apple dumps Intel for MacBooks: does it matter?
there's a similar thread on Quora @
http://www.quora.com/What-are-some-good-collections-of-thoug...
I suppose they're making some use of their gigantic caches of the whole web as a proxy, too?
So how much did he spend on advertising? Why is he saying that all of his advertising only goes towards a single day of sales? Shouldn't it really be seen over a week after and week prior to get a good idea of the impact it had?
Ask HN: Best Paypal payment method to use?
I'm currently using the SetExpressCheckout payment method with PayPal on my website but I'm losing conversions because it doesn't appear to show the user any payment information such as the amount they'll be paying and what products they are buying. Apparently they're supposed to come back to your site to review the order and then submit it again from there, which sounds verbose.

What is the best PayPal method so someone goes to your site, enters their email address, goes to PayPal, sees the complete order and exactly how much they'll pay, clicks Submit and then is routed back to your site with a receipt?
Thanks for the compliment, much appreciated!

It is intentional to draw some attention (though not to distract from the article), for two reasons.

First, some people complained that they liked the articles but didn't know what my credentials were, so while the initial design for swombat.com was much more minimalist (like DaringFireball's), I realised that I'm not John Gruber with a fanatical following of hundreds of thousands, and so I still need to convey who I am to the majority who haven't heard of me.

Secondly, a good friend advised me that blogs are much more memorable and engaging if the author's picture is visible (which your comment supports). And it makes sense - people are naturally very good at recognising and remembering faces.
...am I reading correctly that his argument for using C++/D (!) is that it's hard to remember to say this:

try {
mightFail();
} finally {
doCleanup();
}

instead of this:

mightFail();
doCleanup();
Thanks, 1 billion+ impressions are impressive. Would love to hear more about some of the technical challenges you face. Perhaps a blog post sometime on that? :)
He sort of glosses over the "syntatic sugar" in C#. Which is simply:

using(var resource = new Resource())
{
// potential code that throws exception
}
When dealing with failed replicability it is important not to conflate a poorly designed experiment with a poorly written methods section. Often there is tacit or socially negotiated knowledge required to properly replicate an experiment. This doesn't mean the science is bad, it means science is more social than some would like to admit. For some interesting reading on this check out Harry Collins's paper "The Seven Sexes: A Study in the Sociology of a Phenomenon, or the Replication of Experiments in Physics"[1]

[1] http://soc.sagepub.com/content/9/2/205.short
Are you saying he's not qualified to do those things, or that he's a whack job?
Previous discussion on the original blog post: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2518075
Mongoose is only selecting for the listening socket, so the comparison there isn't particularly valid. Mongoose scales as well as threads on its platform scale.

Mongoose also does a fair bit more than your software does, including SSL, CGI, HTTP Authorization, and file uploads.

Neither of them, frankly, are particularly trustworthy in their present state (Mongoose has apparently actually been audited by someone, but it too stores lengths in signed u64s). But Mongoose, for all its extra functionality, is actually somewhat smaller than yours.

I'm glad you're playing with this and wish you the best of luck, and would only urge caution about advocating that people adopt this code (or Mongoose). Most developers would almost always be better off with a better tested server, or one implemented entirely in a high-level language.
You're extending the OP's context to his reply, which is not a given (IMHO, specially at first-level replies, which could be approaching the posted link from any angle).

From the little context provided by his reply, and his reply only, he could could just as well be a literate camera thief hanging out here on HN and using stolencamerafinder.com to upgrade himself from just a thief to a thief + stalker! And the sentence would still be correct as-is! :)

I take it as "you wanted to nitpick to my nitpicking". Fine, heh, I'm just as guilty of nitpicking, but I see it like this: from the ridiculously easy to come by counter-example above, your nitpicking is not standing on solid ground.

Happy nitpicking! ;)
silencr - Ringer/Sound profiles on a schedule.
https://market.android.com/details?id=com.shynnergy.silencr

Pimping my own product, but I use it everyday!
if PHP gets something right before your language does, you should reassess your life goals

:)
I get similar speeds at work ( financial company in NYC ). Can't download any games though :-(
Which counts as the sugar which he mentions. See also "using" in C#. These are pretty clearly design warts. WPF (C# UI library) jumps through some interesting hoops to make it look like all your resources can be properly garbage collected, but even then it tends to come back and bite you for any non-trivial application.
Is R an ideal language to teach the fundamentals of programming to beginners?
Or the comments are getting lost. Reddit seems to be having some database corruption problem right now.

In a thread in /r/linux, I replied to a comment. Then I submitted a new comment. Then I deleted the new comment.

A little later, checking my overview, the comment I had NOT deleted was missing--and a comment from a different user (properly attributed to that user) was listed in its place. Going manually to the /r/linux thread and finding where my comment was supposed to be, I find that it has indeed been replaced by that other person's comment.

Back in my overview, if I click his comment to be taken to it in context, I'm taken to a /r/sports thread, where that user has several comments and where his comment that is now in /r/linux would make sense.

I submitted a ticket to let them know about this.
I've been using hubski for a few weeks. It is a place of intelligent discussion that opens my mind up to new things.
The truth of that depends on the accuracy of the title of:

Violence is a curvilinear function of temperature in Dallas: A replication.
Rotton, James; Cohn, Ellen G.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol 78(6), Jun 2000, 1074-1081. doi: 10.1037/0022-3514.78.6.1074

http://psycnet.apa.org/psycinfo/2000-07798-005
Let's boil that down a bit:

Meetings should be for discussions, not education.

I think he's correct that PowerPoint encourages the latter and discourages the former.

However, I think he's wrong about having people present about things outside their area. That only encourages them to do research into things they have no business in.

Instead, only call meetings when decisions need to be made, and only let people prepare the facts needed to make those decisions, not presentations.
To Blog Or Not To Blog: Venture Capital Insights from Fred Destin
And in python you'd use the with construct.
Yes, most implementations of x86 translate opcodes into equivalent RISC-like micro-ops.

But this was necessary to achieve any kind of real performance with x86. It's a terribly-designed architecture where all of the instructions are scattered all over the map. There's no unifying design, and most operations that should be simple to implement require scads of silicon. Much of the power wasted on x86 chips is in that instruction decode hardware. It's terribly inefficient. (It's also a horrible instruction set to deal with.)
It's been possible to make structures that small for quite awhile actually, but the applications are just a lot harder to realize than anyone expected in the early days.

Even as an undergraduate back in 2005, I was fairly easily making ~50nm structures with interference lithography and the equipment wasn't even that expensive. One day that technology should be useful for filtration, quantum dots, and such from the list you linked.

Edit: Fixed typo
I agree they are cool, but why not just use a similar solution that does the same thing. Require a couple second server wait time in repeated requests from the same IP. Even if the spammers had over 1000 IPs (and most don't) this would still kill the speed with which they can mass request. Doing this would allow slow machines to get the same wait time as everyone else.
If you are using GBs of Heap space, GC pauses are going to make you cry before you worry about an OOM error. More, smaller processes are the way to go for a number of reasons (recovery is cheaper when you lose smaller things..)
I read a good point made by someone on HN. Hubpages might have had a lot of crap, but it had some good stuff. But that is the exact same as Youtube - but Youtube wasn't punished in the panda update.

For what it's worth, I rarely saw hubpage results in my searches anyway.
what happens if x.dispose() throws an exception?

if (x != null) try { x.dipose(); } catch (Exception){} }

it's why the using keyword is so nice. Still, this is all hoops languages force us to deal with when they shouldn't (which is the OPs point)
Java finally (pun intended) gets a similar feature in Java 7 later this year: try-with-resources:

http://download.java.net/jdk7/docs/technotes/guides/language...