skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It may depend on your style. I know some programmers who can just construct a complete function in their head during thinking. For them, typing is just a mechanical step to dump the code into a computer. You know, those who claim they can code with cat >foo.c. If you're one of them, probably typing speed doesn't matter much, since it is not the major part of development.

I'm more like an oil-painter. I have to put something on canvas to think. Always typing small expressions into REPL to see where they take me. Writing down a function from top of my head and see if it looks right---I mean, not only logically, but also whether it feels natural and straightforward on screen. Emacs is an extension of my brain. If I have to type slowly, it really gets in my way. If some bad setting on driver or some slow connection to a remote machine puts a delay in the response of keypress, it drives me crazy. I couldn't stand if my own fingers are the cause of the delay.

(BTW, the original article claims "Slow-typist => Bad-programmer". Saying some fast-typist write bad code has nothing to do with the claim. You have to show a good programmer who types slow to refute it.)
I can see why CO2stats may be successful, phrases like "purchases renewable energy to neutralize it, so your visitors feel good about staying longer." are quite compelling for some people...

Ah this website uses a ton of power. CO2 is evil. CO2Stats "neutralizes" it so that it's all fine.

Wouldn't it be a better idea to help companies reduce their power usage, rather than "buying renewable energy" to offset it? Or encouraging them to install their own renewable energy sources.

If I murder 2 people, and offset it by having 2 children, is that fine? :/ (As long as I display a button on my T-Shirt saying I'm "Person neutral")?.

Given the wild inaccuracy of geo-ip lookups and the million other factors at play, I don't see any value in guessing at numbers here...
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=301030
7 Years later WTC Never Forgotten | TechJaws
A Billion More Laughs: The JavaScript Hack that acts like an XML Attack
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Imagine how easier and cheaper it would be if you could Download Hannah Montana Episodes. The reality is that you can actually download all Hannah Montana Episodes from the Internet at very High Speed
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I like it. It's practical. It's useful. It solves an existing demand. Has an ingenious biz model. What more do you want?

I'm using it now and I'm loving it.
Well, rarely ≠ never, but I just thought I'd go look for some examples - decided Oscar Wilde quotes would be a good place to start

A man can be happy with any woman, as long as he does not love her.

A true friend stabs you in the front.

All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling.

Ambition is the last refuge of the failure.

Just as examples. Admittedly I'm cherry-picking, but I'm 100% convinced that smugness or a sense of self-superiority is integral to "wit."
Agree. Just don't go on a publicity blitz before your product is at least beta stage.
Mind reading with Google Chrome
> If it's a "lines of code" contest, then sure, learn to type fast, but if it's about producing good concise code I don't think typing speed makes much difference.

In my experience, good, concise code is rarely written on the first pass. Also (and unfortunately), more often than not people who don't type well are unwilling to spend time on rewrites...
Installing memcached And The PHP5 memcache Module On Debian Etch (Apache2)
This guy is unreal.
He is a genius and he is so modest.
Most important he is always eager to learn. He said somthing simular about classical music.
A lot of people should pattern oneself on him.(This includes me!)
World Communication Awards Shortlist
This is less an issue when programming in lambda calculus, if one takes the combinator approach and just uses S, K, and I.

I know, I can hear the complaints about the lack of good libraries...
In the trade this is known as "Short and distort"
You can probably guess how "pump and dump" works now right?
All of these arguments are getting really old. Google said they'd provide an API. I bet you'll be able to do all of these things without even having to fork it.
World's cheapest car is now officially roadworthy
It’s Social Networking for Babies - Twitter From the Cradle
Exclusive Interview: Microsoft Admits What Went Wrong with Vista, and How They Fixed It
Court bans VoIP app on iPhone
Nice little "business" model he's got there, but at least we know he's no hacker.
Acai Berry
A small grape-sized berry that grows in the Amazon Rainforest of Brazil, the acai berry has been called the worlds #1 superfood by nutritionists and doctors.
Good luck Shawn! Keep us posted on how things are turning out for you.
Thanks. I burn only a few hundred bucks a month, currently. I've been living at a friend's trailer with his band. In exchange for contributing around the house, I get a roof over my head and all the Ramen I need, so not a bad trade. I'm aiming to stretch the money to last a year and a half, but realistically I'm planning for one year. It may also help that I'm 20... It would be hard to sustain this kind of lifestyle after I have assets, I think. I'm also grateful that I'm working with an extremely talented partner.

You're correct. To get tasks done, I have to intensely focus on them one at a time. It has been frustrating to build a product during nights and weekends. A lot of times you simply feel too burned out after work to continue on essentially a second workday. You do anyway, of course, since that's what's required -- but why go through that stress? It is such a relief to have ~50 hours of my life back per week. I'm also fairly sure that those hours won't be wasted, or that the waste will be small, because it's actually a lot of fun to resist temptations like tv, forums, games, etc. It's so much more satisfying to create than to consume.
How to Save a Billion Dollars
Cascading - Answer For The Question Few Would Ask
It says in the article,
"Quinn Emanuel's contingency business makes up less than 10% of total hours..."

I don't think that qualifies them as seedy.
Vista Productivity Feature
Forgive the neuroscience buff here, but I disagree.

By looking at the keyboard, you're relying on vision to direct motor actions and detect errors (fingers in wrong positions, etc.). This requires the involvement of association cortex in, I believe, the parietal lobe, to integrate vision, somatosensory (i.e, touch), proprioception (i.e, body position) stimuli. The end result is that typing speed is limited by the processing speed of the cortex.

On the contrary, pure touch typing does not involve vision. Somatosensation and proprioception can be integrated in the hindbrain and spinal cord, and so touch typing can be done almost exclusively there, with only goal-oriented, "type this word" input from the cortex. Vision comes in later to detect errors, but because it is not in the loop, touch typing is not limited by it.
I can't speak for them, but I've been able to type at ~80WPM for 20 years, since about age 10. I took Pascal and C in college 12 years ago, but to this day I'm a borderline useless scripter.when tasks call for a bit of Perl, Ruby, automated bash, or whatever.
Yeah but this assumes that children will believe just like their parents. It ain't necessarily so!
Regulation is not the same as ownership rights.

If you can own, make exclusive use of and trade that ownership, it should deliver an efficient outcome - at least from an Economics lens.
Two of the ten points on the list address your concern with fonts.

3. Use Crisp antialiasing on your font layers.

4. Use web safe fonts on any parts of the site with live text.
If you are capable of mocking something up in HTML+CSS, you should be able to know what to avoid in photoshop.
Did you learn to write by "figuring things out", or did you learn to write from imitating what you've read?

By figuring things out. Like I said, this is my experience. I understand that others' experiences vary, but I have never gotten any benefit from reading anyone else's code.

But you have plenty of time to get 12000 karma here?

Not even in the same ballpark as blogging. I've been here almost 2 years, dropping in daily with a few submissions and responses. Doesn't take long for karma to add up. If I was blogging, OTOH, I'd have to make a major commitment to make regular high quality submissions. I don't care for irregular or stream of consciousness blogs. I'd rather just code.
So, you're saying Congress should fix the SMS cost at the current rate, but tax carriers 95% of their text message revenue so they only make a reasonable profit? Not a bad idea; that might go a long way toward balancing the budget.
I don't know where his data are comming from, but in my experience, most programmers read... so this stat is definitely vastly different in different social circles...
...it's a sign that there's something suspicious going on...

Thank you, silentbicycle. That's what I was trying to say, but you said it much more eloquently than me.

I have always looked at "tools" with a wary eye. Are they really a solution to an existing problem or are they aspirin (or a crutch) for a pain without addressing the underlying cause. I realize many people believe the former. I usually believe the latter. They don't call me a caveman coder for nothing.
10 interesting open source software forks and why they happened
I think it will be interesting to watch how the web developer community responds to this. The negative sentiment against Microsoft seems to make it 'unacceptable' for Microsoft to deviate or innovate, because that will interfere with standards compliance.

It goes without saying that the other browsers have been deviating for years as well, but... somehow logic doesn't seem to factor into it much.
Having books on your desk doesn't necessarily mean you read them. Most likely, he was showing off.
At least the made up numbers I proposed at least we in the double digits of probability lol. I put your numbers in the 0.0001% chance of occurence. In other words, I give you a 0.0001% likely that a group of founders+investors will bring in a CEO post-financing and give him (1) enough equity that he earns a $10-$20m payout, yet (2) only let him earn $130k/yr.
If anyone should try it's this guy - there are so many cowboys running amok in the space that someone with this sort of background is, for better or worse, going to pass the green "sniff test" and be above suspicion. At least to the extent that FUD allows.
So now that this is banned, people wanting to download it will have to do so from an FTP server in the US instead of in Germany?

What a waste of the court's time.
Ask HN: Why doesn't Dilbert quit?
With all the troubles he faces at work, his manager incompetence.

Why doesn't Dilbet quit, move to another enterprise or embark on his own start-up?

Why do I have to watch him everyday, being humiliated, teased and frustrated?

Why doesn't he quit?

I pitty him!
6. You must always be on guard about avoiding "group think". It's so easy to get caught up in talking about and doing the exact same failing approach as so many others. Other parts of the country won't afford you the luxury of developing another facebook app or firefox plugin. You'll need a better business plan and maybe even some customers and revenue.

You don't want to be a frog boiled alive because you never noticed that the water was getting hotter while you plugged away without any sanity checks.
Because transmission and switching equipment would be cheap?
Ian Hickson discusses HTML 5 features, pain points, adoption rate, and more
Because he shags Alice every day around lunch time in an unused conference room, and he found a loophole in the billing subroutine for their e-commerce site that allows him to route $1.00 from every transaction to his personal account.
Ubuntu 9.04 “Jaunty Jackalope” Announced
Reduce Power Usage in Linux with PowerTOP
Autism may have helped swimmer survive
Congratulations. Have fun with it. I am going to have to do the two jobs thing myself for a while, though. A wife and kid need income. You are in the perfect position to be doing what you are doing.
A useful link

http://sriramanamaharshi.org/

Happiness
All beings desire happiness.
Everybody loves himself best.
The cause for this love is only happiness. So, that happiness must lie in one self.
Further, that happiness is daily experienced by everyone in sleep, when there is no mind.
To attain that natural happiness one must know oneself. For that, Self-Enquiry 'Who am I?' is the chief means.

prakash@kinet1.com
Reduced Dominance Is Predicted for U.S. - Analyst Previews Report to Next President
Call me old-fashion but I wholeheartedly agree with Plan B, Plan B focuses on being cashflow positive first before ramping up the growth strategy while Plan A focuses on getting big fast before figuring out how to get to cashflow positive

And that brings me to the point made by Mark Cuban about how the current batch of entrepreneurs are being cheated by the likes of Netscape into believing that you should follow an eyeballs-then-cash strategy, instead of the common-sense cash-over-eyeballs strategy (or what Mark would say Cash-in-the-pocket strategy).

Fame/popularity on the Internet is ephemeral (Geocities? Youtube celebs?) and you jolly well make sure you are bringing in cash fast. Sony wouldn't have bought ClubPenguins for so much if they weren't bringing in USD 80 million in revenue every year. If ClubPenguins had twice the eyeballs but one-tenth of the revenue, the buyout price would be way lower.

That is not to say that the eyeballs-then-cash strategy wouldn't work but it is statistically insignificant when compared to the larger population.
When have you released too early?
Before opening this I thought this came from someone that sold their company...
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congrats! make that money last.
Giving iPhones X-Ray Vision (Killer App)
Building Google Chrome: A first look
Video Demo:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KgTwSXK_5dg
Chrome Vs. Firefox Fighting Over 20%
How many engineers do you have in your team?
The 'post' is 6 lines and serves solely to link to this interview: http://blogs.openforum.com/2008/09/10/how-to-save-a-billion-...

I realise some people are going to click on a link labelled with guykawasaki.com simply because it is labelled with guykawasaki.com but I can't help feeling like I'm jumping through hoops.
Can/do you use it to kick off your user base to critical mass?
> I'm also grateful that I'm working with an extremely talented partner.

Congratulations! If you don't mind me asking, what is the situation with your partner (did he or she take the plunge too?)

"Go for broke. Always try and do too much. Dispense with safety nets. Take a deep breath before you begin talking. Aim for the stars. Keep grinning. Be bloody-minded. Argue with the world. And never forget that writing is as close as we get to keeping a hold on the thousand and one things--childhood, certainties, cities, doubts, dreams, instants, phrases, parents, loves--that go on slipping , like sand, through our fingers." - Salman Rushdie
> I know some programmers who can just construct a complete function in their head during thinking.

This is interesting. What level of detail do they go into? Most people should be able to do this at a simple level. The fastest example is probably a wrapper function: you probably know 100% what you intend to type before hitting the first key.

If you are making a bigger function that has intermediate variables, naming the variables properly becomes an exercise in itself. When these programmers do a "code dump" from their brains to the keyboard, are all the variables named already? Do they use placeholder names then replace them? Do they first write the algorithmic parts then do the naming?
Fon hits a million users. Will they survive U.S. bandwidth caps and overage charges?
Just one word: plastics.
Congrats!

coughkarmawhorecough
Because he's not like the rest of us who make up less then 1% of the IT industry.
Hmm interesting. What happens if a mini black hole is launched into the sun. Is it possible it just gets consumed?
Hyperbrain Owner's Manual - 4. The value accumulator
I keep threatening to get two foot pedals. One for CTRL and one for ESC. I think it would give me vim superpowers.
For the same reason that Amazon has free shipping?
Also, I just learned that 46% of a cell phone bill is taxes.
Most of the CS students I know don't really do any coding or reading about CS outside of their classes.

But I agree, I think it is garbage, meant to make the reader feel good.
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Guys, could you please take a look at the project I am working on: http://keybr.com
I thought it could be a good touch typing trainer web application.
This article was published back in May. Although it's marginally interesting reading it in hindsight I don't think it is terribly relevant to today.
> allows him to route $1.00 from every transaction to his personal account.

From the crippled children?

No, that's the jar. I'm talking about the tray, the pennies for everybody.
Ruby people praising TDD is like hearing Java people blown away by Design Patterns or C people talk about techniques for avoiding buffer overflow errors: Sure, it's a good thing that they're trying to improve the quality of their software, but to some extent their methodologies are compensating for tradeoffs (and sometimes just flaws) in those languages. The trick is telling when they're genuinely useful techniques from when they're solving problems that could have been avoided entirely.

I don't think that all tools are bad, though; far from it. Just, sometimes it's better to address the root causes of problems, rather than symptoms. (Almost always better, in the long term, but deadlines happen.)

I'm working on a tool right now (not ready to share yet, it's a rare spare time project), working title "dehydrator" (like the DRY principle and hydras, dragons that keep growing more heads) which can scan code (or arbitrary sequences of tokens, really; it's an OCaml functor) and report on heavily duplicated patterns it finds. The motive is to help reintegrate code that has been copied-and-pasted to several places with only small changes. Obviously, the solution is Don't do that!, but the world is full of projects that already have years of cruft.
The thing I've come to realise recently is that most people in IT are resigned to the fact that they work for money and live life outside work. Even the thought of starting a company never enters their minds. I quit recently to start up a company and almost everyone from my old employer that found out I was leaving asked me what employer I was moving to. On hearing my news most said something like "wow that's really brave!". I kept saying is it? The reality is it would have made more sense to them if I'd said I was taking a career break to travel the world for six months. I kept saying but this way my cost are much lower and I have a (hopefully good) chance of making real money, compared to the traveller that comes back - all be it having had a lot of great experiences - broke and looking for work again.
Dilbert doesn't quit because almost all of the mini-storylines contributed are from real workers (to Scott Adams) and he acts as silent mouthpiece for us anonymous workers
The anonymous p2p-project Freenet does similar forward error correction --- and did it for ages.
Just to let you know, I was one of those people who reviewed and commented on PolishMyWriting when you posted it here 16 days ago.

Your site has continued to stick in my head. There's been more than one occasion that I've thought this email or that blog post should have been run through your system.

HN has introduced me to a lot of new sites, and not one has struck me as immediately functional as yours.

I think it could be very popular. My only piece of advice (and honestly no offense to Ashley Johnson) would be to hire a new graphic designer to give it an overhaul.

I like your idea of analyzing corporate blog copy and sending them the results, but why not do that for any popular blogger? If they use your service, they might write about you. There are a lot of blogs out there about blogging.

Good luck, to both you and Shawn.
most people in IT are resigned to the fact that they work for money and live life outside work

For me, it was PG's essay that overwrote this idea, which I had been raised with -

http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html

In defense of the amazing people who raised me with the work/pay assumption, they lived most of their lives in the Soviet Union, where there weren't many options aside from working for money handed down from a higher power.
I shall live vicariously through you. All the best!
Because then the comic wouldn't be funny.
I just skipped down to the bolded text. Took about 10 seconds.

I'm sure he had something else important to say.

Maybe?
Here's John Hess, creator of the classic TV soap opera Love of Life (1951-1980) and later a writer for MASH:

"The basic notion of writing a soap opera is all so-and-so has to say is such-and-such and the story is over, but they don't ever say it because then you would have nothing to write about it. 'Why doesn't Beany go to his father and tell him he took the book?'

"Well, because then you've shot about a month's worth of scripts. The great secret was how to attenuate and retain interest. How did I? You approach the same set of circumstances from different directions. If you have a couple talking about divorcing one day, the next day, you have another couple talking about the first couple's divorce."

(From The Box: An Oral History of Television 1920-1961 by Jeff Kisseloff. One of my favorite books.)
It has. That $630K price is down from $990K at the height of the bubble. Concord houses were about $2-3M in late 2005 and early 2006.
That's the best idea I've ever heard.
God Particle | The Astronomy Blogger
For the same reason that so very few people start businesses - the FUD of the unknown.

Predictability is a great comforter for many risk-averse types, a category to which the great majority of engineer-types I have known belong.
Pretty good choices for the list. A bit of history and details, but only very little analysis of why they forked.
Nice reference, and a classic movie:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PSxihhBzCjk
Making sense of lifestreaming
because it'll be exactly the same no matter where he goes. Except at the new company he'd be the new guy, and will lose all his seniority perks.
Instead of a seal that nobody cares for (hack-proof, privacy seals are OK, but green-certified seal?), why don't they enter the carbon credits market?

This seems like a misuse of technology. Use this technology to help companies trade carbon credits. A few bulge bracket banks are already in this game. They buy carbon credits from African cooperatives cheaply and sell them at a healthy profit to factories who need these credits.

And they are making millions from it. What are you waiting for guys?
I doubt many companies will want all their insider knowledge on a hosted solution.

As far as black mailing them into using it? I doubt it...a corporation is much more likely to simply ban the site so that their insider knowledge instead of going through the process of signing up and entering their CC details