skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Unlike many of you here, I am a reddit late adopter. I first joined HN (like 3 years back), there were plethora of good posts so I never explored more. I never heard much about reddit for 1 year I think. Then there was this major discussion about how reddit is not relevant enough these days, that put me off reddit altogether. Then about 6 months back (I think) a good man posted a long discussion about how subreddits are the best things about reddit. I thought I would go and check. I made my account in March I think and randomly searched for subreddits. That makes me perhaps the latest adopter here. And I must tell you, I like those subreddits much better than HN now. There are many reasons for that but first remember, to each his own okey. So no need to flame me about my opinions and choices.

1. Its actually more relevant. I have many interests but CS is not a prominent one. There are some good intellectual discussions here but most of them are about highly technical stuff I cannot understand or comment on. I am a Electronics major so I like /r/ece and /r/electronics. They are smart people and have great discussions. Sure I do not comment much there. But still the comments are more valuable than the post itself (just like HN). Apart from that there are subreddits about prowrestling which of course will never be mentioned here. So I find subreddits are actually more relevant to my life.

2. They are smart people. Contrary to popular beliefs, not every redditor is abour lolcats. Most of the people I interact with on reddit are very smart. Not only in technical subreddits but reddits like r/SquaredCircle/ and /r/prowrestling see very interesting discussions. Pro wrestling is a technical thing and they do justice to it even while comparing thoughts about story lines.

3. I like the light hearted part. I don't know about you but people here are very focused on their work perhaps. Some light hearted comments (even if they are witty or clever jokes) will get downvoted and fade into the background (literally). To some extent these things are permissible in subreddits. I like that. I am not in the mood for a fierce discussion every time. Many times comment section can be clearly divided into two parts, relevant discussions and witty comments. The latter will fade into the background here. Also due to this, nobody rides high horses there. People on HN are many a times guilty of that. Like in the recent discussions about game industry and endeavors like facebook and 4chan where people think that intellect is wasted on such things. Why would you judge what people want to do for there whole life? I wouldn't and I don't like people who do.

4. New subreddits come up when I like. I am going to join either ai-class or ml-class (dammit I need to decide), subreddits of both are available. Isn't that fantastic?

So this is why I like reddit more than HN now. Sorry if this hurts anyone's feelings but that is how it is.
Decent article.

A note though, I find the 3-D engraved body text that is popular on some sites such as this one to be harder to read than flat body text. A bit of eyestrain comes with it.
No one has ever broken a properly designed CSPRNG properly seeded with more than 100 or 200 bits of entropy, total.
For #2, I don't think the three environments actually mean the answer is no. If you can build to dev in one step, and then move the build from dev to UAT in one step, it should be fine.
Well, sure, but 150 years gives you about 75 years of extra research time.
I am constantly surprised that people are constantly surprised by this. I get that people think they should recieve better service because they pay. But remember what you are paying for: the business verison of Google's apps. So color me unshocked that features arrive much slower. Especially social networking features.
Nitpick: 2. Can you make a build in one step?
Ans: No
But build in one step does not really mean deploy to production right from a dev box. It generally means can you build your code to a deployable artifact or actually deploy it on a server in one step. Or may be I don't understand what OP meant.
> Any system in which the value of the patent is potentially infinite (as in the current system) is materially broken, and it is just a matter of time until someone finds a way to game it (non practicing patent trolls).

Incidently, patent trolls are not a new phenomenon: Elias Howe was on in the 19th century. http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2009_04_26-2009_05_02.sht...
> when it comes to the big dreams, I procrastinate, and I don't know why.

It's difficult to break down big goals into a series of attainable steps. Faced with this challenge, it becomes easier to maintain the status quo and not do anything.
While Joel Test is good in general, for a bank some of these requirements aren't relevant or advisable. The author gives a reasonable argument for why #3 isn't applicable here.

Rule #2 seem to yield no flexibility with regards to testing and deployment processes. Certainly having a single-step build and deploy to a development server (and subsequent single-step deployment to a production server) should be acceptable. In particular, this strategy ensures that a development system has been tested before going live.
I recently bought a TurtleBot (turtlebot.com), a ~$1,000 robot with a netbook, kinect, gyro, and roomba. The TurtleBot platform combined with the Robot Operating System (ros.org) - a popular, open-source robot framework - is an affordable way to test out and learn many cutting edge robotic algorithms like room mapping and navigation. It even supports telepresence.

I consider myself software oriented too, and recommend it to others who are looking at going beyond a basic microcontroller based robot, but without all the soldering.
summary: Apparently, Amazon's HTML5 based ebook reader does not use encryption. Hence, it should be easier than usual, to copy the content.
I'm still waiting for my android powered android.
I find the Joel test such a useless measure. It doesn't actually tell you anything about the quality of the code being written.

In other news, tomorrow is my last day at a large investment bank...I plan on curling up in a ball and crying for the next couple weeks over just how miserable the experience was.
Shocked! Shocked, I am!

Good riddance to bad rubbish.
There are a lot of places that still use tarballs for "version control". Technically it saves "versions" even if it isn't quickly accessible, and doesnt require a proper VCS
This would measure the popularity of titles/headlines (and maybe domain names) but not of content.
People finder
People Finder provides an easy to use service for finding people. Moreover people finder offers access to a wide range of information, we could not place it higher on the review list because we received incorrect information from some of our searches.
What reddit really needs is a ranking engine
recommending users, submissions and comments
to you based on the users you've friended and
the comments and submissions you've upvoted.

Do you realize the insane amount of calculations that would take?

For each pageview you would have to find all stories in that subreddit, find all the authors, find all stories you ever voted on, find all the users you are friends with, and somehow rank all this shit.

It will cost millions of dollars a month in CPU time just to run something on the scale of reddit.
SCO vs Linux: it's over
I don't think this is a fair comparison.

Simply because the software company operates in the open does not mean that they are more likely to let bugs sit for a while. I've worked on closed-source software that suffered from the exact same problems.
Sounds pretty dire Ron. There are places in the finance industry where developers do follow good practises, so don't give up hope! If you'd ever like to chat about how these things could be better, get in touch (email in profile).
I agree that many of the parts aren't really that useful.

That having been said, if we were to devise the "HN test", what would be required?
Then there's Joel Test meta-question #13: "Do you know your score?"

Even more important than the absolute score, I think, is that a company is A) well-read enough to have heard of it, B) realized the value enough to run through the exercise already, and C) knows the items they need work on without having to look it up. In other words, it shows _velocity_, a culture of continuous improvement.

I haven't been in the job market for awhile, but back when I was, the first words out of my mouth to the contact at the other company was "What's your Joel score?" It's amazing how effective a filter that question is, because the only responses you get are the right one (9<=x<=12) or "I don't know." Other than perhaps "Will you marry me", it's perhaps the highest shannon entropy of any four-word question.
I think ronbeltran might be misinterpreting a couple steps. First:

3. Do you make daily builds?
Ans: NO
I don't think daily builds apply to bank software development. Once a build is deployed in PROD it will never be touched again unless needed say Central Bank changes specification/compliance.

Making a daily build doesn't mean deploying a new build daily, it means making sure that the latest version of code actually builds. This definitely applies to bank software development.

Also:

Can you make a build in one step?
Ans: NO
Before our programs reach PROD (production) It must pass to 2 servers (DEV, UAT and PROD). We need proper permissions to do the build which by default we don't have.

The question about making a build in one step isn't about the phases of deployment; it's asking if there's an easily triggered process that can create the binaries and necessary files instead of a builder having to follow a complicated manual cookbook.
The art classes Melbourne are of great help for learner
These art classes Melbourne also have paintings and pieces of science and technology. The art classes Melbourne are of great help for learner to learn drawing and painting. There are special classes for the fresher who want to learn art and drawing. Art school Melbourne is must visit place for the tourist visiting Australia.
Quite possibly the most important paragraph in this essay for a product at the customer dev stage (and probably easy to underestimate... it's a very subtle point):

"There are two things you have to do to make people pause. The most important is to explain, as concisely as possible, what the hell your site is about. How often have you visited a site that seemed to assume you already knew what they did?"

It's hard to attain the perspective of a completely fresh user when you've been in the trenches hacking away for so long. And as I've discovered, if you can't explain it, you can't sell it, cos no one landing on your site's gonna pore over the genius invisibly possessing it like a ghost in the machine.
Great post.

I'm a developer/artist spending long hours working on making video games. I 'm doing it all, the design, code & art.

Sounds good. Problem is it can get very lonely, you get no encouragement and no criticism. You might make good progress, but sometimes it seems like it would be easier to settle into the nicely defined role of 'designer', 'coder' or 'artist' and only have one thing to worry about.

Reading your post reminds me that I'm not crazy, it _is_ possible to be 'jack-of-all-trades' in the software development stack and to realise an uncompromising vision of your product.

I'm glad there are some who share this idea, thanks :)
AMD Motherboard Driver
Freesoftz maintains the list of available Amd motherboard drivers which are free to download.
Switch to 7zip. It is more efficient than zip and it passes through Gmail fine and you then don't need to worry about renaming files
As a programmer, I do not expect a designer to know, understand, or be proficient with coding. I don't disagree that any designer who can do both has a tremendous advantage. But, I think it should be possible to just sit down, "draw a picture", and have it just work on every current platform, at various screen resolutions, and various internet connections.

That's not possible right now, but I think that's because us programmers have done a terrible job. We have built awful tools. Some are less awful than others, yes, but with 2012 just around the corner and about two decades of web development behind us, we still have not developed a tool which allows a designer to sit down, and do what they are best at, and make their imaginings into a working reality without the assistance of an engineer who speaks a strange vocabulary.

I would not expect a sculptor to need to know the finer points of structural engineering. Any sculptor who did would have a clear advantage over their peers -- but I am skeptical that it would make them a better sculptor.
Lots of AutoDesk products are extended with Python, like Maya and MotionBuilder

And in our studio, for good and bad, Windows is mostly deployed (audio guys might consider getting Macs again, as there was not proper support for ProTools on recent Windows versions)
It's not necessarily just software that has killed robots. For instance why have a robot to wash the dishes the same way as a human, when you can just pile them into a dishwasher and be done with it?
The Joel test gives a nice proxy to measure the experience levels of the people in charge.

Inexperienced people seem to underestimate their risks, and overestimate their abilities. Everyone eventually makes a mistake, but the Joel test reveals how likely mistakes are to be caught early, and how quickly a team will be able to recover. When it comes to an complex system, these quickly become critical to maintaining a measure of quality, regardless of how "awesome" the individuals are.
- I use .txt files.
- On work OneNote

Everything local and have backups, not in the cloud.
Software is incredibly powerful, but it the robotic revolution is still coming. Obviously software cannot explicitly deal with physical objects as easily as a robot can. I mean, you can have software that will find you the cheapest maid service out there and send them to your door while your at work, but the software can't clean your house.

Robots are taking much longer then we first thought because the problems are much harder then we first thought (pg talks about this is one of his essays on AI).

As of right now, humanoid-consumer viable robots are too weird, slow and clumsy to be of real value. Look up some willow garage (google-backed) on youtube for what I mean. But certainly within my lifetime, we will have something that will be able to fold your clothes, do the dishes and cook you breakfast, all before you get out of bed.

It may be nothing like what the writer was thinking of back in the 80's. I could see a set of robotic arms mounted on the ceiling in the kitchen, which could cook, clean, and then get out of the way, resulting in no awkward robot-human interactions. I don't know what the technology will be, but it will be coming.
I'll comment on each in turn, since I think the author is so far out in the boondocks of corporate hell that he hasn't even been exposed to some of the things Joel is assuming as standard.

1. Source control. Sounds like they're possibly working mostly in mainframe or DB languages that don't have a clear "edit compile run" loop. This does make source control harder, but it's still important.

2. "build" doesn't refer to deploying to production. It refers to making a complete version of the product so that you can verify that Joe didn't change the method signature that Bill relies on.

3. Again, this is about build for testing purposes, not pushing to production.

4. No bug database. The answer is confused. It seems as if they don't have any concept of a bug tracker, that there is only the schedule or change requests or something along those lines.

5-8 that's great, it sounds like management is at least competent even if modern software development best practices have passed them by.

9. Best tools money can buy? I don't think you can say that without version control and a bug tracker.

10. No testing. Very alarming. Maybe acceptable for the pinboard guy ("I'm very careful") but I don't see how that can fly at a bank.

11. Code in interviews. This isn't surprising. At this point the test is moving from marks of competence to indicators of the outstanding.

12. Usability testing. I think you've effectively pointed out that at least one item on the Joel test isn't universally applicable.
Yeah. The dual file format trick reminded me of the GIFAR exploit where you take advantage of the fact that GIFs are header-based and JARs are footer-based. In the present case, one format (PNG) is header-based and the other format (HTML) is headerless and generally tolerant of weird data.
This is a public service announcement. Get a new job.

The best, brightest, smartest developer I ever knew was working at a company with a score of ZERO. Talk about wasted talent. Now he works for me and we do awesome stuff.

There are dozens of companies in any significant metropolitan area who take software development seriously that are begging for competent developers. It doesn't have to be Google, there are well-run boring companies that pay well everywhere. You're (demonstrably) one of the only developers with sense where you are, don't stay there.

Please. You can do better.
Google now blocks 257 compromised DigiNotar certificates
How Do You Run Your Developer API Community?
That's not what the Joel Test is intended to measure. You can write quite excellent code even with having a score of 0 on the Joel Test. It's purpose is instead to gauge the quality of the team and workplace and their ability to get the work that needs doing done without being bogged down with all the problems that come with poor processes.

In general the practices highlighted in the Joel Test are some of the most high impact in improving overall development velocity and efficiency as well as in preventing burnout. There is a pretty strong correlation (at least in my experience) with low Joel Test scores and teams/companies who spend a lot more time fighting fires, fighting with tooling, struggling just to get basic dev. tasks completed (e.g. building and testing), working excessive hours, etc. As a consequence of that their productive work vs hours worked ratio is so low that they end up putting out a lower quality product at a much higher cost and they end up causing a lot of excessive stress to developers.
Windows Keyboard Shortcuts
I don't understand how this is new. Don't Haskell and a couple other languages already do this? My understanding is Haskell has been made to run a million transactions simultaneously, so it's performant.
I'm guessing you don't have four kids. Sometimes, when the dishes have piled up on the counter above the dishwasher, I think a domestic robot would be amazing.

But then I teach my kids "character" by making them wash the dishes they couldn't bother to put in the dishwater.

Really, there are still any places robots can be helpful that software isn't appropriate for. I do think the human-looking robot is DOA, with task-specific robots taking the place they were given by scifi authors.
Probably the hardware and equipment, computers, servers, licenses, offices, etc.
I think you're right that it's about being different. A disproportionate share of entrepreneurs are immigrants, for example. We are already used to being different, so we have less to lose.
Fairy Tail
Show HN: Our node.js knockout project - realtime code coverage heatmapper
If experience is any indicator, probably never.
Sadly the headline isn't even close to true in my experience.

My company is called Think, so it's safe to say that I value independent thought highly. I design and I code.

Unfortunately, you also have to be a lawyer, an accountant, a salesperson, incredibly paranoid, and a lot of other things in order to automatically "win." And that's just assuming you play by the rules. Most people don't.
> Until recently, it's been difficult to put a lot of CPU on a mobile robot

Define "mobile"?

Household and other single-site robotics applications should not be severely constrained by the advancement of embedded computational hardware. Wireless transceivers can provide the bridge between the limited embedded systems in the physical-actor hardware in the living space, and the heavy computational hardware in a big box in the closet.
Change in financial situations creates lot of stress. When your stress level is high, the typical path you are going to take is the one that alleviates your stress and not increase it.

Sebastian is suggesting x10 higher wages for his clients. This is a financial breakthrough in the life of the client. It creates enormous amount of stress. The stress pushes you back, for a less stressful zone.

I say this because I was there, and I'm sure I'll be there again. I see this differently than the OP. I don't think that people don't understand you, especially when they are smart. The simple fact of thinking of it generate stress and they hide from hard/stressful situation.
The 4 Characteristics of Highly Effective Developers
You said "most," the article said "Absolutely must." Also apart from Amazon, all of the companies on that list were funded in the last couple of years, so your 15 year span is sort of ridiculous.

"you should be in the valley if you want big VC relatively straightforward and uncontroversial."

The guy just gave you scores of examples of companies not in the valley that raised big VC - controversy
Free Fractions Worksheets and Lessons
Report: Apple Loses iPhone 5 Prototype. Yes, in a Bar.
EXPECT_TRUE(state->IsEnabledForHost(&domain_state, "docs.google.com", true));
EXPECT_TRUE(state->IsEnabledForHost(&domain_state, "sites.google.com", true));
EXPECT_TRUE(state->IsEnabledForHost(&domain_state, "drive.google.com", true));
I know the creator acknowledges this, but the news sites aren't even close to (or trying to) fixing the news. Maybe someday down the road they will morph, but in fact there has been very little to be done to create an online news organization that both provides original reporting and is substantially better than the web adaptations that traditional media provides. If all we get is better aggregators, the orgnaizations generating the news to be aggregated might still fail.

Personally, I think the best prospect for something awesome to happen in the news sector is that a profitable aggregator similar to HuffPo (but probably not them for a lot of reason), Techmeme or Google News, really makes a run at becoming a media organization. This would require investing in setting up real live bureaus and paying for boots on the ground journalism, but at the rate the current guardians of media move (AP just added links into their stores), it might have some traction.
not sure about the others, but Groupon opened offices in SV . . .
Design-Based Blogging Tool Is A Meme-Maker On Steroids
> Big companies that use patents as a revenue stream (MSFT, IBM, etc.) typically bide their time and bring a patent lawsuit once a new company is established and there is blood to drain.

Doesn't the legal doctrine of laches prevent this?
for someone that thinks they are creating the future of toys, this is incredibly shortsighted. This post shows a lack of vision. Why would I even want to go to hipmunk, when a robot will get the ticket, pack my bags, make sure they are at the airport where they need to be, and all I'll have to do is board a plane. Aisle50, i don't want just deals, I want someone to either pick them up or deliver them, put them away, and automate this process for me every week.