skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't see any place in the article where it says, "The author is dumb, therefore the code is bad," or anything remotely like that. The article does observe that the code is great from an academic but not professional standpoint, but it gives reasons why that is the case. There's nothing ad hominem about the article.

If anything, your comment is more of an ad hominem -- rather, the positive version of the same, an argument from authority -- with the implication that F/J is probably good since Doug Lea wrote it.

> The complexity criticism sounds a bit like "I don't understand this code! It must be bad!"

All complexity criticisms sound this way. Some are true and some are not, and we must attempt to separate which is which. But dismissing the criticism because of how it sounds without actually investigating the claims yourself is not good. "This sounds like X and is therefore dumb" is not a valid refutation.

It seems like you are trying to undermine some minor points in the article and claim that the whole thing is bunk as a result. What about addressing the major points instead. Can F/J scale across thousands of cores? Is work-stealing task-management actually valid in Java? Is the performance actually good? Is monitoring and stall detection available? Would a better approach use the Unsafe extension less? Etc. Otherwise your comment will not add much except for misleading weak-minded people into thinking the article is baseless.
For all the talk of "best practices" and "training" the depressing truth is that guaranteeing correct software is incredibly difficult and expensive. Professional software engineering practices aren't nearly sufficient to guarantee correctness with heavy math. The closest thing we have is NASA where the entire development process is designed and constantly refined in response to individual issues to create the checks and balances with the lofty goal of approaching bug impossibility at an organizational level. Unfortunately this type of evolutionary process is only viable for multi-year projects with 9-figure budgets. It's not going to work for the vast majority of research scientists with limited organizational support.

On the positive side, such difficulty is also in the nature of science itself. Scientists already understand that rigorous peer review is the only way to come to reliable scientific conclusions over time. The only thing they need help with understanding is that the software used to come to these conclusions is as suspect as—if not more so than—the scientific data collection and reasoning itself, and therefore all software must be peer-reviewed as well. This needs to be ingrained culturally into the scientific establishment. In doing so, the scientists can begin to attack the problem from the correct perspective, rather than industry software experts coming in and feeding them a bunch of cargo cult "unit tests" and "best practices" that are no substitute for the deep reasoning in the specific domain in question.
When I wanted to submit some patches to one of the Protocol Buffers projects, I was asked to submit them via Guido Van Rossum's Rietveld tool, which is a public re-implementation of an internal Google code-review tool: http://codereview.appspot.com/
The key tool does have an equivalent counterpart, written by the same people who wrote Google's tool. See http://code.google.com/p/rietveld/ for more.
Agreed. I love Tom's overall tone in that article.
Except, of course, the string theorists...
Microsoft's Patriot Act admission has the EU up in arms
At least at some point you could view the news feed of people in a given friend list in Facebook too.
It detected my Mac OS X just fine, asked me to execute a Java Applet and then make my Firefox crashed.

I restarted Facebook using Chromium and stared a Video Call. It works like charm.
Did Google show their alliance to Microsoft when they released Chrome for Windows well ahead of other platforms?
It's pretty awesome, especially with other people. You can build a shocking number of things, and fun at it too.
But once again, all my friends who I'd ever want to video chat have Facebook, and I still can't get my + invite to work. For a majority of users, Facebook will have done it first, even if + really did.
Cross-domain 'content extraction' using fake captcha and iframe
I'm a M.S. student in mechanical engineering facing a similar situation, except I haven't put any code on Github (my advisor wants to keep it proprietary, but I probably would not bother putting it up even if he were ok with it).

I've written around 15000 lines of MATLAB for my research and only a handful of people will ever need to see it. Some is well-structured and nicely commented, but other parts are incomprehensible and were written under severe time constraints. My advisor is not much of a programmer and will not be able to figure it out, and I feel bad for leaving a pile of crappy code to the person who inevitably follows in my footsteps, but I ultimately have a choice between writing fully commented, well-tested, and well-structured code and graduating a semester late (at the cost of several thousand dollars to myself), or writing code that's "just good enough" to get results on time. This is a solo project (there is no money for a CS student to intern) and I'm not getting paid to write code unlike a professional programmer, so every second I spend improving my code beyond the bare minimum costs me time and money.

Even if I were able to tidy up and publish all of my code, most mechanical engineers would not be able to understand it because most can't write code. Those who can mostly use FORTRAN, although C is becoming more common. Nonetheless, even those who could understand my code would have little incentive to read through 15000+ lines of code.

Unfortunately, as far as research code is concerned, a lot of trust is still required on the part of the reader of the publication. I agree that the transfer of knowledge should be handled differently, but until there is a strong incentive for researchers to write good code it will continue to be bad. Especially when many research projects only require the code to demonstrate something, after which it can be put in the closet.
This wouldn't be a healthcare startup in SF, would it?
Is the script available? I can't seem to find it on there.
It's even worse when they don't even read your resume until they enter the room.
To be fair, it seems similar in that it allows you to perform an action within your current page, including modifying embedded content.

It's different in that I don't see how you can add new content to an existing page.
It's about the smartphone platforms.
I used Mono for a couple of things that required only a linux daemon. .NET is much better at interoperating with native code, from the sourcecode point of view. It's also got a much better language (C#). It was definitely a good choice when scala was still young. Nowadays... pretty much depends on what you're used to.
Mikeay2:  Fan Page or any web page to my 4,052 loyal Facebook Friends for $5
Programming is not just engineering – it is design.
I seems that only blog.jquery.com is misconfigured. jquery.com is OK. But it makes sense that this would be a part of the problem, since the blog has the freshest content, and the bad result does come from the blog.

However, this still doesn't explain why jquery.it has such a high pagerank. And blog.jquery.it has a pagerank of only 1. I can't find any interesting-looking links to jquery.it that would explain the high rank. It's also strange that Google returns blog.jquery.it 1st for the search "jquery 1.6.2", since those strings are found at lots of highly ranked blogs (pagerank>1 for sure). We could be dealing, once again, with Google's preference for finding search terms in the domain name. But this puzzle is still not coming together for me. This is why I'd like wiser persons than me to try to get to the bottom of this.
Multiple Domains vs Subdomains vs Folders in SEO
Startup Therapy: How to deal with feeling like you live a lie?
Things are supposed to be going great right now for me. My startup is making progress, secured some funding. Won a few prizes. The code is coming along nicely.

But my private life is an utter disaster. I'm in debt. I'm neglecting my family. I'm alienated from my friends. Besides my startup I'm doing none of the things I want to do.

What helped you get through moments like this?
Even the list hurts the eye. It still baffles me why Sharepoint is so pervasive in the market.
With the exception of my gadget geek friends ponying big money for the latest 4G-whatever, everyone I know who has an Android phone got it on a two-for-one special or nearly free discount. These huge Android growth numbers aren't being driven by the $300 mega phones.
EFF to Obama: Syrians Deserve Access to Communications and Information Tools
This article offers a pretty nice summary, but was wondering if any HNers out there have experience with this topic - considering sub-domains versus separate domains for one of our company's projects. Thanks.
That is a correct reasoning. In classical physics, as everything is predetermined, no real probabilities exist. We use probability theory to gauge our uncertainty about the world.

If you knew the position of every particle in the dice, there would be no distribution of side, it would always come up the same. But we don't and can't know everything, thus we use probabilities to express that. If you throw the dice, your uncertainty drops because you know the outcome of the experiment.
Yesterday's discussion:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2732537

And only Microsoft could champion cross platform web apps by forcing you to view the demo video, not in a native format, not in the ubiquitous, cross-platform Flash, but Silverlight. Guess that shows me how much interest I should continue to have in it.
I think you may have taken my comment out of context. The [deleted] post I replied to was asking why the extension was asking for so many permissions.
I've worked with Dan, and he knows his stuff. Looking forward to seeing what he's got in the works.
Lots of datastores don't keep everything in RAM though. CouchDB uses up a whole ton of disk, because disk is cheap and the way the database is structured the disk reads aren't even a problem for performance.
Not sure how your anecdote relates to the conclusion. Forgetting, or even knowing why, to transpose a matrix is not an example of a problem that can be solved by "a basic understanding of software development". Hell, I'm sure there are many decent hackers that don't know what a matrix is, let alone spot such errors within a long sequence of computations.
first time i saw video from camera being immediately rendered inside a window on computer screen in 1995 (it was in Russia where we were technically noticeably behind the West) It still blows my mind what video chat is still not ubiquitous, and that a company adding video chat feature is a matter to notice.
When I was in school everyone used MSN and then later when I switched AIM. Still use them, because those people are still there. Have really mostly ignored facebook chat, and fbchat also does not show user status messages.

They've basically just brought facebook chat on par with instant messengers from the 2000s except you have to install something additional for video chat.
It won't be a bigger market than smartphones, not even close. There are 5 billion phone subscriptions in the world right now. They will all be replaced by smartphones.

EDIT: Also iOS growth is slower than Android growth, still, so it's just a matter of time before even iOS numbers get beaten, with or without Android tablets.
Is Motl famous? I've seen his name popup everywhere physics related. Should I know him?
For what it's worth, I've heard it with one or two degrees of separation that Jeff's contribution to the (now) Raikes School was completely isolated from their decision to go with Microsoft for their email a year or two ago. Besides, he'd already retired and acts most as a philanthropist.
MySQL has always (despite its usage) the red-headed step child of databases.
We use Haskell intensively. It is a very useful and easy language. Once you mastered Haskell (and get used to the type system), it feels very natural. It is both usable for scripting and "real" tasks.

The trick with Haskell is to model the data you are going to use. Haskell has a good mathematical ground and if you model it right, you can leverage a lot of mathematical tools.

We use it on a web project in combination with PostgreSQL. These two match pretty nicely. Both have strong type systems. We wrote an JsonRPC server in haskell, which acts as a secure proxy between the database and the client.

We also use it for system scripting. We wrote a special embedded DSL based on arrows for critical tasks. And we use it for the analysis of data. This is mostly a pipeline ala: Parsing -> Interpreting -> Analyzing -> Storing, where every phase has his own data type. It is great for writing parsers.

It has the speed of a compiled language and the ease of a scripting language. It doesn't match c or c++ of course in speed. But you can get very close and in almost all cases close enough.

The main negative aspect is that it is difficult to reason about your code in terms of performance. And laziness can also do wonderful unexpected things. And bugs in the compiler.
The original announcement (2008):

http://www.scribd.com/doc/50406482/Hacker-News-Integrates-Wi...
Here's the important file: https://bitbucket.org/nik/blockplus/src/f654b42e8530/chrome/... The rules look pretty straightforward, but I don't know if AdBlock supports such granularity.
Nobody ever posts facts to back that up. They just assume it would be true. But HTC and Samsung are making a lot of profit on their Android phones, much more than they ever did with other mobile OS.
It's making it slightly more accesible. People you generally would be willing to make a video call to are probably already on your skype, phone, or other contacts.
Perfect, I thought I was going to have to give up Mondrian if I left.
Isn't this just saying that any number has a chance of 1/6th for being "it" before the dice is rolled, and that once we have rolled the dice and it landed with 6 on top, the number 6 obviously has a probability of 1 of being "it"?
Fair enough. I'm more familiar with Mongo and Redis.
While it's certainly true that past performance of a technology is not a flawless indicator of future success, I'm not clear on what makes "now" the time for video chat.

With the iPad, Apple's key insight was that tablets had sucked because the OS hadn't been meticulously tuned to afford use on tablets. I'm curious as to what people think the key insight is that Facebook is bringing to video chat?

From what I'm reading here the TC author seems to think that Joe Average User wasn't using skype or stickam or any of the previous offerings for video chat because the user base wasn't there. I don't know about that, because all of my friends have had skype forever and I can count the number of times I've video chatted with them on one finger. I feel like I wasn't using those, and won't be using this, not because the user base wasn't FIXNUM huge, but because it feels intrusive and I don't want to feel like I have to shower, shave, and put on presentable clothes just to tool around on Facebook.
It is addicting, and whatever you generally spend your free time doing will be absorbed. Your interests might feign after a bit, but it won't be until you've spent a good amount of time building something.

I look at Minecraft as a good entry point for video game development. The modding community is huge, and getting larger now that Mojang is officially creating an API for modding. Also, because it is so transparent; the original map was nested folders (which is where converting to a 3D printer is so 'easy'). Logic-wise, its not built to make processors, the logic is slow. The aforementioned book would be a better suitable candidate for it.
Yea same with me. In Canada we used MSN and when I moved back to the US it was AIM, even though MSN felt like a much better product.
Retail experiment allowing Koreans to grocery shop using QR codes at subway
Why do people even do this kind of thing? The person who registered the trademark obviously knows the term 'bitcoin' was already in use. Does this person just want to make other peoples' lives more of a hassle?
Does the list of commands for csh or emacs hurt your eyes too? I can read virtually every command and know what it does. This is certainly clearer and easier than the magic emacs and vi incantations. ZZ
Not a huge fan of the link tag. It's mutated by now into the "this is somewhat related to this page, somehow" tag. (I mean, seriously, rel="sidebar"?)

I'd think in terms of semantics, the <embed> tag is more appropriate. If you want to re-use existing tags at all, that is.
Next feature announcement from Facebook: ghetto bling wallpapers
I shudder to think that such a "company" could be developing health-related software.
Video chat isn't a technical problem, it's a social problem. I have multiple ways to video chat almost wherever I am, but I almost never want to video chat. When was the last time when you wanted to video chat but couldn't? That's never happened to me.
The issue is that Android can be used on any hardware product whatsoever, so inevitably there will be both premium and more commodity type products that cover all market segments. Virgin Mobile already has non contract Android smart phones that retail (no rebate) for $150, far cheaper than an iPhone.
execution execution execution
This isn't going anywhere. It will be reviewed sometime around August 22: http://tarr.uspto.gov/servlet/tarr?regser=serial&entry=8...
"New application will be assigned to an examining attorney approximately 3 months after filing date."

And if you do a search for 'Magellan Capital,' who filed the trademark, their trademark is dead.
What is this and why do I care?

The blog post is vague and the link just takes me to the "download itunes" page.
MySQL is still most used among the HN audience. There was a 'what database are you using?' poll last month I believe.
1 KB Grid is even more minimal, with no hack selectors like clearfix to puzzle over:

http://www.1kbgrid.com/

http://www.1kbgrid.com/css/grid.css - 960px example
5 News Media Sources to get content
In my last blog post I described 5 useful news media sources to get daily content. I use it to get info about technology and SMS news but you can read about many other subjects that interest you.
Does Google require code reviews for all its open-source libraries? It doesn't seem so because some of the open-source Python projects are a mess.
Sure, but that's extra work, and the people I'd allow to see my presence generally can reach me in other ways.
This should be interesting to watch develop. The conflict in national laws amongst the G8 is fascinating.
I think you're confusing news and reviews. "G+ is awesome" is clearly indicative of an opinion, and in that sense the headline is actually quite descriptive of the content of the article, unlike sensationalistic headlines.
Can you post it somewhere else or pastebin?
The terms of the license are good, but its name is literally crappy:-/
It used to say "3 years ago" right?

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

That has some guidelines on titles and mentions that "the editors may rewrite it."... perhaps they didn't like that you used the number 3, and preferred 2007 because that has more meaning?
So mature leader == ability to say something that will make everyone happy, but lacks concrete terms? I realize that part of leadership is keeping people happy, but is it really correct to consistently bury a little bit of content in a lot of fluff?

The trouble is that, as a guy working for The Man, corp-speak just makes me think that the corporate leaders are guys who will say anything as long as it can be couched in non-offensive terms.
Arguments along the line that Facebook holds an advantage or a competitive edge because of the size of it's userbase are patently flawed. By that reckoning, myspace would still be a serious contender, but the size of it's userbase couldn't mitigate the damage inflicted by bad management, poor quality, contentedness and lack of vision.

I personally think that Facebook suffers form the same problems, especially contentedness, with the additional problem in the fact that their founder and public face isn't all that likeable.

In short, solely because of Google+, Facebook is the new Myspace in all the wrong ways.

And of course, it would be naive to discount the advantage Google has through the presence of one person and one person alone; Andy Hertzfeld. He's a big hitter... a really big hitter. To me, it feels like Yoda just turned up to show the young upstarts what it really means to be a Jedi.
Why didn't you go for BDB, assuming you've considered it?
Is the author of this article also the author of a competing fork-join framework? Although it shouldn't invalidate the technical criticisms, an undeclared conflict of interest is a good way to sabotage your credibility.
Even when money allows for this, it's not always possible to segregate the work. I.e. a scientist may fully understand the mathematics of his work, but not understand that translating the math directly into code will cause serious performance issues. A programmer should understand the performance issues, but without a deep and intuitive understanding of the mathematics, including what assumptions are implicit therein, will often have difficulty making the translation.

In many cases, projects with sufficient technical depth require detailed domain knowledge that can be acquired quicker and cheaper by hiring scientists or engineers with that knowledge and then teaching them to code (or code better), rather than segregating the work and dealing with the problems that result from the communication gap.
I agree. The trademark symbol reads as pretty snarky.
This is cool, although I'd rather have a nice voxel editor that I can use to print stuff to a Makerbot. Would I be best served just using a Minecraft map editor, even though I don't play Minecraft?
This is how Kiln[1] got started at Fog Creek. We wanted a good way to do code reviews after checking it in to a branch. (Checking in before you review makes it possible to review the changes in steps, instead of looking at one huge diff.) Django Dash was coming up, so we entered and made that our 48-hour project. By the end of the weekend we had a basic prototype that took two Mercurial repos (branch-by-clone) and calculated the diffs from that.

Fast forward a couple of months, Joel was talking about adding SVN to FogBugz. We were sick of SVN and had this prototype, so we polished it up, presented it, and got approval to start working on it for real.

[1] http://www.fogcreek.com/kiln/
Best Quora answer ever regarding PHP at Facebook
They picked the period right AFTER apple released a phone (verizon iPhone4) to look at growth. It's cherry picking of the worst sort.