skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Agreed, may be I have seen only bad code. I am still a student and the only industry code that I have seen was in Java. Much of the rest of code, that I saw in academia, was functional in nature and written in C.

I have observed that (may be due to the lack of a review system in academia) the code was much harder to read. With C, the problem was even worse due to extensive use of global variables and poor structuring of code. Java, on the other hand, has two benefits: firstly, it's really strict and verbose. So even if a person is practicing bad coding, it is still harder to make truly unreadable code. Secondly, the IDE are more powerful, makes coding as well as code browsing easier.

My prejudice might be against C and in favor of Java. And i just related it to functional and OO respectively. But I would like to add that modifying objects still somehow seem more intuitive to me - probably because I had a better Java teacher than a C teacher. :)
I know this is a very popular notion, but I don't think it's actually true. Two arguments follow:

One often overlooked thing is that as a market becomes saturated with a product of a company with total market share, those already-sold products increasing become that company's competition. So long as the company does not resort to special laws from the government (i.e., does not seek to obtain a coercive monopoly), it must continually best its existing achivements. This is sometimes accomplished by adding features that give the company access to new markets for its products (selling a smartphone after gaining experience with portable music players).

Secondly, on an individual basis, the desire for excellence always comes from within, and results from an inward ethical focus. The goal for those true strivers is not set by or on the existence of others: it is not "let's destroy X," but rather, "let's bring this new thing into existence." In a truly innovative company, this attitude predominates because it is held by the majority of its employees.
I wasn't going to contribute further to this, but after considerable thought, I've decided that you have me confused.

When do you get afflicted by this "cruft"?

If it's in the item that is a duplicate of an earlier item, isn't it better to have the cross-reference?

If it's in my comment history, why are you looking there - it's full of "cruft."

It seems to me that the only times you'll come across it are when you actively seek it - and that's no basis for a complaint - or when it helps you avoid splitting a discussion, and that's surely a good thing.

But no mind, never matter, I'm not doing it any more.

=======

ADDED IN EDIT: For what it's worth, in the current top 30 items on the "newest" page there are 5 duplicates of previously submitted items. If people start a discussion on those then they will be missing out on the discussions that have already happened. I think that's a shame, and it offends my sense of "taste" as an engineer.

(also edited for typos)
On the usefulness of N-back (scroll to heading "Notes from the author"):

http://gwern.net/DNB%20FAQ
I find it amazing that with all the interest in bio-mimicry, this hasn't been tried before. Did nobody ever ask why all plants share a very similar architecture?

They've even made solar cells that look like leaves before http://techon.nikkeibp.co.jp/english/NEWS_EN/20080527/152443..., but nobody bothered to test if a tree-like structure gathered more energy.
Also relevant:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pair_programming#Costs_and_bene...
I'm surprised by the number of upvotes on this.

He overhears one guy's comment and spins a yarn. With no basis.

Sure there are programmers who like settlers of catalan and wear joke tshirts. Doesn't mean they're programming Gods.

What the original off the cuff remark meant is get someone with some serious experience who's done it before, someone skilled in more than one language and who actually understands the fundamentals behind the frameworks, in fact they could actually could write a framework themselves.

But Javascript, PHP and Perl? C, C++ and Java. Come on, who's this guy kidding?
Ask HN: If a person was a SEOgod, would he be the king of micropreneurs?
Hello Hackernews, I have a question for you guys. I've been doing a lot of reading lately about SEO, and started to wonder: why aren't all these SEO experts super rich? With the skills they have, they could probably make a living without working for anybody!<p>So anyway, if I were to become super good at SEO, would I be able to make a full time living off of it?
Amazon gets 20 percent of global retail traffic
I've been involved in providing comms during disaster recovery and this would be extremely useful during first-response / search&rescue.

1. You generally have access to power by generators.

2. You have an entire community and international USAR (urban search and rescue) teams fly in within a matter of hours.

3. Android/iPhone/Netbooks. There is not really a shortage of these and they are easily flown in with USAR. Mobile companies have been great at donating during these times.

4. There really are bigger problems to worry about in these situations. And believe me, if someone is caught doing 'asshole' activities during a disaster, the community never lets them forget it.
Changing form factor is also considers evolution. Tech people tend to ignore anything beyond a list of specs, but something like iPod Nano design creates interesting ecosystem beyond the initial "omg it supports MicroSD", e.g. the iPod Nano wristwatch.

I know at least six people bought the iPod Nano because of that and they will probably never considers buying one if Apple were adding MicroSD or supporting FLAC. (Can't comment about Spotify, Rdio or Rhapsody because they're not available in my country anyway.)
I hope you realize then that there is much more to teaching than telling a child - no matter how precocious - "pfft, that ain't so great."

Being an asshole is never excusable. While I understand your point about not over-praising, this actually is something that few of his peers are able to do. Proper praise for the boy would be to appreciate the effort, applaud his commitment to the problem and recognize that he may be able to make the solution "better".

Once you do that you can point out areas for improvement.
Well done on the tool.

The Java Overlords should take note: this is what the language should look like. It shouldn't take special software to be expressive.
Autism is not a personality trait.

People magazine would have more respect.
Absolutely love:

1. IDE plugin (Eclipse, Xcode + MSVS incoming)
2. Community driven snippets
3. Integrated into autocomplete

This approach is the trifecta of productivity for software developers.

I remember years ago finding some "overly smart" autocomplete hints from IntelliJ that surprised me, for example typing paths to files and having it automatically guess at the path given the execution context and that blew me away.

At some point all of those "try and be extra smart" rules fell out of favor and seemed to disappear and just get replaced by more robust/concrete type-inference inside the IDE. I understand why, trying to be TOO smart and getting it wrong is absolutely maddening and helps no one, but it was still nice to see.

These clippets remind me of a middle ground, where the tool is trying to be very smart, but also requiring you to fill in the part it can't concretely guess at (e.g. path variables in the demo video).

The other big win here is that since this is essentially search plus paramaterized clippets, there is no reason this cannot work for Python, Ruby, Go, JavaScript and anything else you would want.

The community aspects of building up the repo is just brilliant. Best of luck to this team, this looks like a hell of a nice job!
Java sucks because it makes functional idioms frustratingly heavy to use
Perhaps a "merge with other post" option in HN would suffice. Both posts get merged (with the links of the submissions there), the conversation threads are merged and people with an urge to curate can enjoy doing so and we can all enjoy not having duplicate (or near duplicate) posts clogging up HN?
Why Microsoft is the vital new underdog in mobile computing
... and TextMate s'il vous plaît
What’s Worth More: Kodak’s Patents, or Its People?
Sure, the code is sloppy. For whatever reason, that action wasn't using "newer" rails practices to return different responses to form and ajax requests.

respond_to do |format|
format.js { head 200 }
format.xml { head 200 }
format.html { redirect_to '/' }
end

We do something like this in every other case in the code base. This is actually what's more encouraged to Rails developers.

There was another similar issue with Rails and the Google Web Accelerator: http://37signals.com/svn/archives2/google_web_accelerator_he.... In this case, the GWA was "clicking" links on the page to pre cache them. Sucks to be you if your application's delete links are straight GET links!

In this situation, the community encountered the problem and immediately started advocating better practices to get around these problems. Such as using form buttons (and later, ajax-enabled links) for unsafe actions. There's a clear standard practice in the web development community here, and these early Rails apps weren't following it.

However, every other browser with XHR support for years has handled redirects the same way. Even though the spec is ambiguous, it certainly suggests being cautious and only automatically redirecting with safe HTTP methods. IE9 breaks this trend for some reason. I'd feel much differently about this if every version of IE worked this way. At least there would be some consistency with itself. And it surely would've been encountered and added to the encyclopedia of weird IE behavior that web developers have to deal with.
25 cents on top of 50 cents.

You have to take into consideration the discount they are required to give as well.
Why I do not write too many Linux reviews
Foo Fighters Do Scrum, Too
I hate that Bill Gates quote, why would you cite the opinion of a guy who isn't known for his programming ability nor has any history of hiring good programmers?
There is a very good series of posts by Andrew Gelman (a statistician at Columbia) on the tension between statistical graphics (eminently clear at the risk of being boring) and information visualizations (captivating, colorful, and novel, but obscuring the data):

http://andrewgelman.com/2011/08/infovis-and-statgraphics-upd...

Professionally I do projects on the former side of the spectrum, but as with any design you just need to know the audience and how you want them to use the graphic---to grab their attention and interest, or to catalyze insight about a data set.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/ericsavitz/2011/02/08/googles-an...

$5.90 in 2010, increasing to $9.85 in 2012. Estimates from Piper Jaffray but based on things said by Eric Schmidt.

Android is a volume business for Google.

(By comparison each iPhone is worth $100 - $150 a year to Apple).
thank you, i have a new motto.
If you have to ask, the you're not ready.

Quitting your job and striking out alone has to be the kind of decision that comes from passion. Yes, you have to be ready technically and financially. You'll need a plan for food, shelter, the internet, and the support from your friends and family.

But all that's got to play second fiddle, a distant background, to that burning need to create. The desire to meld a future in your own hands, that consuming passion that blots out all the worries of consequences and obliterates apprehension with just the pure possibility of what could be made.

Don't get me wrong, have a plan. But if you're not driven mad by the incessant need to let the fruits of your mind explode out of your fingertips, if thoughts of your future, your career, what ifs, and what nots are still around, rotting at the foundation of your desires, then you're just not ready.

You will need that passion to survive on your own. It will be difficult. You'll have tough times, worries from your family, and worries from yourself. The self doubt can at times be a terrible burden, but the demon in your mind demands to be satisfied, and it will have it's way. You must hand yourself over to it and it will drag you to success. But only if you can give yourself fully.

In short, you don't take time off to do something because it will be a good move for your next paying job. You take time off to give yourself over to your passions. You've only held a paying job this long so you can become that junkie and still live.

(It's how I get by)

Oh, and if you fail, the experience will only make you stronger.
CoffeeShit: Because Script Happens
I'm a fan of 'Plan together, implement independently.'

I don't need someone looking over my shoulder hunting for bugs while I program. What I need is someone to bounce high-level ideas off of so that I don't get paralyzed by indecision, or overlook an important edge case.

Bad design decisions concern me a lot more than a bug here or there.

In my experience, planning with someone else away from the computer, and then implementing is as fast (and usually faster) than sitting down at the computer and trying to bang something out from scratch.

When you do things this way you don't really need to have another person there because you've already agreed on all the important details.
Why Blocking Social Media During Civil Unrest Is Never the Right Choice
>Why can't my GPS use my google contacts so that I can find directions?

Because you haven't installed Google Latitude?
Do look at what the rest of the market is doing! So the market doesn't specifically hate HP that much, maybe a couple %.
Even worse than not obey them, they've been known to treat them as confirmation that their spam is being read, and send more spam in response. Or sell the email address to other spammers as a confirmed-good address. It used to actually cost money to spam (but nowhere near as much as it cost the recipients).

Not sure how much this still happens, with spam being so much cheaper to send with botnets.
A network without ISPs who can block users? I could name a few groups who would not like it.
Is there anything in this article that hasn't been said a dozen times already? Go get some new thoughts.
Studies have found reduction in defect rates of 15% to 50%

Correlation does not equal causation...other practices that usually accompany teams that pair include continuous integration and a strong focus on automated testing.
> First, they're messing up the aspect ratio of the devices with the manipulation

From the article: "The aspect ratio has not been measurably altered".

> And there is no better way to project that point except by making the screens look exactly the same size without a note saying 'scaled size to show similarities'?

Apple noted in the text of the filing that the sizes are actually different.
Let's not forget that many of these same Android partners are also making Windows phones on essentially the same hardware. Would the partners absorb the cost of forking and managing an OS or just drop the OS for a competitor?
Those horror stories are actually somewhat scary for a business owner. Not being able to dictate what time your discount starts?

If people have a bad experience with the Groupon at your store, the store gets inflicted with tons of bad reviews due to long lines, long checkout times, etc etc etc. While in theory this sounds like a good problem to have, its not and won't provide a sustainable stream of customers (i.e. majority of these customers come once, have an awful experience because of the aforementioned problems and never come back).

While my sample size is small (~15 biz owners) I saw it first hand at a restaurant in Somerville. My buddies and I stayed for 3 table turns around us. I overheard everyone that was there because of Groupon and every single table had no intention of coming back. They didn't mention the cause, but I am assuming it was slow service because the place had a 1.5 hr wait (normally 15mins).
Been thinking more about this: With http://www.google.com/patents, a collective should be able to prepare detailed research on prior art for all kinds of obnoxious software patents. That research could be neatly packaged and ready to go when the trolls come sniffing.
Dropbox's multiple security problems
Hewlett-Packard Plunges as Plan for PC Spinoff Leads to ‘Lost Confidence’
HPQ was down 15% and the DJIA down 0.26%. The gap appears to be widening.
A broadly, perhaps overly general (and oversimplified) read, for sure, but still interesting.

As I am about to graduate college I stand at a crossroads of choosing, roughly, which path I want to go down... iOS development offers a nice compromise, as you can make beautiful things that get Rails hipsters excited, but it's still a strict superset of C and you can do some pointer magic when you need to.

Not sure what the implications are of entering industry as a FULL full stack generalist (not just HTML/JS/Ruby/SQL but all those + userland C++/Obj-C/Java and kernel level C code).

Sometimes those Mixpanel job posts look mighty interesting...
17 Enterprise Project Management Apps that you can use from your iPad
Dose the stock market reflect real investors(by 'real' I mean people looking at where the company will be in a few years and planning to hold an investment for that length of time)? I wonder how much of this is an institution selling enough shares to change a metric and trigger a bunch of algorithms.
>Summary: Some of the side-by-side images of Apple iPhone & Samsung Galaxy S show the phones apparing visually similar, but the Samsung image has been scaled down 6%.

Would you say the same thing if it was Samsung's court filing and Samsung made the iPhone 6% wider make them look dissimilar?

>It's the newspaper that claims that the evidence in inaccurate.

They're using the dictionary meaning of inaccurate. And it is plainly visible to the eye that the images were doctored, unless you don't want to see it, no real need to wait for a court to decide it for you.
Amateur Radio? http://www.arrl.org
The point you need to argue is that the Samsung phone in fact being bigger is relevant to the discussion of whether the design was copied, and I think that's all Apple is trying to show in the picture.
What if the same prediction could be made on motivation letters sent by candidates to potential employers? If I were Google, I would hire this guy. He would fit perfectly in their candidate selection effort of using automated tools to process resumes & motivation letters...
Crap. We've been discovered. Time to go hide under a rock!

The article is stating the obvious: strong engineers that have been building very big services all know each other. That's what happens when you've been in any industry long enough.
Youth Caught on Web Cam of FBI Advisor’s Stolen Laptop Pleads Guilty
Lockheed Martin wants a fingertip-sized UAV in every soldier’s backpack
Ask HN: What would you do if Foursquare copied one of your key features?
> Count how many classes you have with only one method and no data in them.

I have never done this, but for the usecase that you have mentioned, would the following work?

class Xyz {
private Type type;

private RetType type1MethodName(params) {
// Do Whatever
}

private RetType type2MethodName(params) {
// Do Whatever
}

public Xyz(type) {
this.type = type;
}

public RetType methodName(params) {
switch(type) {
type1:
return type1MethodName(params);
type2:
return type2MethodName(params);
}
}

public enum Type {
type1;
type2;
}
}

And then when we want to pass methods according to types, we can just instantiate the class with a proper type and pass it.
You have a generator every few hundred yards, all the way to where you need to communicate with, and you don't simply have a cable running that distance as well?

I'm not trying to knock them. I'm glad they're trying to solve a real problem. I'm just not convinced that it's as bright and shiny as it first appears. There's a lot of other real-world problems that are going to negate the majority of its usefulness.
They're just trying to show the design similarities. Aspect ratio was not altered.
The OP was referring to Samsung devices in general and can apply to the earlier tampering as well, the Galaxy tab did get its aspect ratio changed from 16:9 to a 4:3.
Interesting point from the article:

A legal expert on intellectual property cases, who
declined to be named, asserted that when pictures are
filed both in the complaint and in separate
productions, those in the complaint would be
considered more important. **Visual evidence presented
there typically indicates that the plaintiff wants to
emphasize its significance, he said.**

Presumably Apple are pretty experienced in the intricacies of patent law so I don't think you can blame the intern who can't use Photoshop...
Rules for start-ups from Twitter's co-founder | x-cheatsheets
An API for what you're watching on TV right now
This is really hard to follow. The overall structure of the post is just clunky. The grammar is also lacking (missing articles, non-sentences, incorrect comma usage, etc.) which really makes it difficult to follow.
What is missing in most pairing debates is the amount of pairing day to day being discussed.

Periodic pairing can be a great team building exercise, way to mentor someone, and a great way to be exposed to different programming workflows & tools. This idea doesn't seem very novel to me and hardly deserves it's own terminology, blog post, or article.

Personally I believe "pair all the time" is what is controversial and in my experience excessive. Other then commercial pilots, I don't see other industries where experts always pair.

Also, if 2 people are better then 1 person...why stop there...why not have tri-coding or quad-coding?
Doing stuff by yourself whether it's a startup, consulting, side projects are is very lonely. There's a lot of insecurity you will face, and the sad thing is there will be very little people to commiserate with, unlike the corporate world. Almost noone will understand the uncertainty you will face day-to-day. Noone will fathom the heavy decisions you will need to make. Noone will be there to give you the answers(although you can find mentors). If you will tell people what you're going through, they'll just nod your head and then try to change the subject to their boss, or American Idol. It's a very very lonely road.
Visualize Google search results with Clojure
> So the question posed here, is peer programming a time sink for an early stage startup? No.
> That being said peer programming is just another tool in an arsenal that startups should use in appropriate situations.

So the answer is, "maybe". Neat.
I agree with this - whenever I see that a company has actual pairing stations (computers with mirrored monitors and two keyboards and two chairs) I tend to shy away.

However, I still think everyone should have their OWN whiteboard, to enable precisely the conversations you mention. Easy enough if you have cube walls, but I've never seen a good whiteboard story in newfangled open-plan startup offices.
How Much Does Each Piece of Apple's iPhone Cost?
> Are you guys using local disks or SAN?

No SANs, anywhere! :)

> Are you guys using Eucalyptus?

It's our own stack. Eucalyptus afaik doesn't handle zones as geographically distinct datacentres and, when we looked at it a long time ago, had some pretty worrying SPOFs.

> Why is your outbound data more expensive then?

Transit is symmetrical, and incoming bandwidth is less utilised compared to outgoing so we charge less for it.

> How are you securing KVM?

In what sense?

(Co-founder at Brightbox)
I was taking the unpopular stance that Apple had a leg to stand on in this case because Samsung products can be mistaken for Apple products at a glance. I still feel they are blatant copies.

But now I have to agree with acangiano that this case needs to be thrown out. If it's intentional then it's despicable (and I would say unnecessary) and if it's by accident then it's extremely negligent. Either way Apple has really fucked this up. If they really thought they had a leg to stand on they shouldn't have tried to mislead anyone or should have taken more care to get it right.