skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Finding people who are good at reviewing your code is very difficult.

I think this is generally true even without the emphasis on my particular code. Most folks suck even more at reviewing than they do at coding. And of course it's always hard to find really good developers.

I think there might be attractive qualities for a high quality developer to take on such a project though.. For instance:

Short off-time hours.. like someone in Seattle could review pretty interesting code after their stupid day of meetings that they got sucked into by being too good at their job. Hell, they might be able to do it _in_ the meetings.

Pay... I'd happily pay well over good dev rates for a good reviewer (or set of reviewers). People telling me how I'm dumb and how to improve is great.

Joy of working outside of Java / C# / C++ / VB / ASP.NET corporate code.

Freedom to rip stuff apart without fearing for one's job or worrying about office politics. Some of us have a lot of pent up rage :)
The more obscure the code you're writing -- that is, the more you actually need your code to be reviewed

The only part that should be obscure is why the program is even useful and why it has some features at all. The code and design should be entirely understandable given a 1-page overview document. I'm certainly not talking about cryptographic code as you mentioned.

I'd actually guess that's the case for most code written in the world. Given certain business needs, the code should be reasonably understandable for someone who wants to understand.
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http://www.google.com/search2001/search?hl=en&q=%22Paul+...
Could someone who successfully uses an assistant like that outline concrete tasks they delegate to them? Both private and job related (software engineering here). 9 out of 10 restaurants here do online booking and I don't need to book at the "Fat Duck", with its annoying phone reservation, that often.
The Prof. told this story in a graduate Opeating Systems class I took once upon a time.
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Therein lies the problem: there are no published rules. You only find out that you've broken them after you've completed development of your app and submitted it to the app store. Say goodbye to several months of your life.
smush.it would have been atleast better
Is all of the code you are writing open source? If not, then you may not want to release it to third parties, and they may not want to read it.

I was speaking of closed source parts. Open-source has a reasonable enough review process already. Although I don't want the code publicly available, I don't want to waste my life being paranoid.

Depending on what you're doing, it may be more costly (in time/money) to bring someone up to speed.

Very true. Fortunately, I control the requirements, and I'm almost compulsive about simplicity. I want to be able to keep the code small and be able to rewrite parts quickly. I'm very much into quantity over quality (http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001160.html), so if it's useful, I'd be happy to start from scratch just to bring reviewers up with me.

That said, I want to be able to bring other developers up to speed on the project later, and it might be time well invested trying to make the project easier to get up to speed on. That'd also reduce the dependency on particular people that are in some part of the world I'll likely never see.
Honestly? Suck it up - that's life. You can't expect 100% of people to like what you do 100% of the time.
Categorizing instead of ranking.

Have 5-7 categories. Interesting, Informative, Troll, etc. (perhaps the slashdot categories)

Instead of up/down, pick a category (or several)

I set the system to show me the most interesting, or most informative articles. (or a combination) I also set a troll limit, perhaps 20%, to represent the amount of troll categorization I'm willing to put up with.

Badda-boom, badda-bing. I see stuff that's interesting to me.
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I also find this approach is often the kind of thing that
leads people to assume they cannot do something; they think
that only "really smart" people can possibly do some
particular thing, and refuse to try as a result. Of course,
it can also go the other way--because someone does
something hard, they insist that they must be really smart,
or else they couldn't have done it. This only reinforces
the problem.

To be fair though, this isn't exactly a problem - it's ensured you've gotten a whole lot of lucrative work because there's not a whole lot of competition ;-) There are, possibly, contrasting areas I feel able to tackle that would initially intimidate you (as video compression intimidates me) - that's what makes specialization such a great thing.
How would GPL make an app incompatible with the NDA?
Spain holds 121 over child porn
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No, I don't. But the world is darker this morning: I've got the flu and I read your comment.
The main problem that will need to be overcome for this to get kind of traction - licensing that is generally pretty outdated or brain-dead.

Unless you have an enterprise license, Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, etc - all tend to license on a per CPU or per Core basis...

It's really annoying. Because you'll have some whizzbang J2EE app that you want to run. However, instead of popping it onto your scalable IBM WebSphere cluster, you put in a dedicated WebSphere instance. I've seen it happen and done it myself many times.

Why? Because it's CPU licensed. And the cluster has 10 CPUs that you'll 20% utilise. But it's still licensed as 10 CPUs. So it's much cheaper to license for 2 dedicated CPUs and take the operational hit (and probably environmental hit).

Cloud computing is meant to be licensed like a utility - proprietary software is going to have to catch up. Hopefully they've got the licensing situation sewn up with this.
Man 2001, feels so long ago. That was the year I finally got internet at home, and a few months later I built my first website on Geocities. Damn you Google, making us feel nostalgic.
I think the best commentary I've seen so far is this:

http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2008/10...
Hollywood to take on Real over software that can bypass copyright
There may be a need to create impressions in some lines of business.
Mobile Growth: Don’t Bet On It
Amazon pre-announces EC2 for windows
The bad news: My $4000 Mac Pro may be killing me
Thanks for link. Found it quite interesting.
I am just guessing, but it is currently against NDA for me to publish any source code to an iphone app that I write. If that app is based on GPL'd code, then I am obligated to make the source available, no? So the NDA and GPL would indeed seem to be at odds right now, unless I am not seeing something...
To me, this was an amazing post. I'm not sure I suffer from ADHD, but I get amazingly bored with a desk job.

It's good to know that it's okay "not to work" and not have to feel ashamed about not fitting in all the time.

A great post for anyone who's going out of their minds in their cubicles.
Toshiba demonstrates fast charge laptop battery that can hit 90% in 10mins
Awesome... a professor told me about this too... I was wondering why this story appeared only today in ycombinator, since this is an old stuff... not so weird: I've noticed that the mail has been sent in 1997... :)
Interesting to note this announcement coming prior to the PDC (late October) where Microsost is expected to talk more about their cloud story. Makes me wonder if Amazon and other 3rd parties will be central to it. Also makes me wonder if there is going to be some new Windows Server licensing model that makes sense.
Ireland created a very strong local tech industry by offering large tax breaks and grants for tech companies - with the help of the EU. This is why places like Dell and IBM (or HP? Big tech companies either way) have massive installations in Ireland.

Now that the EU is expanding, a lot of these companies are eyeing off places like Poland.
People who get As are divided into two:

1. One group who are just smarter than everyone else
2. A second group who just are more concentrated on getting more As that everyone else

The first group is likely to be more successful. The second often don't make the transition between that type of highly focused success with all round success. Like many many nerds.
CTO = Produce Best Technologies for The Business

CIO = Consume Best Technologies for The Business
You might want to just read the originating article:

http://translate.google.fr/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.libe...
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One of the reference is actually a good read:
http://shirky.com/writings/ontology_overrated.html

I don't actually subscribe to it at all, but it does give an overview of the challenges for ontologies - and by implication the Semantic Web.
Survey finds that 83% of Americans don’t understand the concept of bandwidth
anyone think there is some fact in this??
It is not the first article that I read on HN that makes me wonder if I suffer from ADHD. How can I know? Any advice?
Sample size (as pointed out in the article) is pretty small - approx 800 people.
bailout is a lose-lose proposition
It's probably true of many of the products we use on a daily basis.
Looking at this selfishly: As an American in my early twenties, how can I land myself a gig in Ireland? I'd love to work/live abroad for a few years.
I agree there's much confusion about Erlang concurrency being related to it being a functional programming language, when in fact it's due to pure message passing. I think this misconception is because some functional programming features are good for concurrency, and Erlang is functional and is good at concurrency - so one would expected it to use the features of the former to achieve the latter.

I write the following to clarify my own concepts, and seek confirmation/criticism:

Single assignment and debugging: In Armstrong's book, he says an advantage of single assignment is that you know what value a variable has (that it hasn't changed). However, each level of recursion has a different set of instances of the same variables, with different values. I don't think these two cases - rebinding a variable vs. creating a new instance of a variable with a different value - are really that different, except that it is easier to track the path of execution with recursion. In this sense, iteration is somewhat similar to Dijkstra's goto.

Single assignment is mathematical: In my high school, an excellent English teacher questioned a programming statement of mine, that "x = x +1", saying "I don't know much mathematics, but I know that's wrong". For me, this highlights the difference between programming vs. mathematics. Functional programming is more like mathematics in this way, and I feel that people who love functional programming also love mathematics (in the sense of proving theorems etc), and also have a solid education in the fundamentals. It seems to me that "single assignment" in mathematics has deep consequences for proving things - which I am yet to grasp properly.

BTW: Armstrong is definitely a mathematician-type - who else, when asked to design a phone control system, formulates an algebra ?
Yeah, it's a bit less dramatic, but it mentions the same facts: benzene present in the fumes, and its known toxicity.
I think this sounds pretty cool:

"In addition, several customers would like to maintain a global single Windows-based desktop environment using Microsoft Remote Desktop, and Amazon EC2 is a scalable and dependable platform on which to do so."

I could see that being a real cost saver for a lot of organizations. I wonder how tolerable the lag is with remote desktop to EC2.
Should the U.S. military be allowed to field a force of superhuman fighters?
The end of art?
We've been doing this under our "Code Audit" service for clients since 2003.
The trick here is "may be"

See? Deceptive marketing, people just read the headline, gets scared and never buys a mac for fear.

Ask yourself this question, who is so ethically wrong to be behind this ad?

Who benefits the most from the damage it may cause a competitor?

There is the answer...
If it's allowed, could you give me a reference to how I could contact your firm? Are you in the US?
Have your peanut gallery enter and then vote on the tips and feature requests, and get the karma system going? Use that traffic to test code and servers and to sound out the comments and the requests, and then to establish in-network invites.
That's one professor, not indicative of the community in general. I won't say too much, not having had personal interactions with the guy, just having talked to others who studied at Northeastern.
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Well, who is going to stop them? They're superhuman...
Computational Neuroscience review: From Spiking Neurons to Cortical Fields
I asked for a bunch of research: some background data for my market, with sources, and a comparison of some vendors I'm interested in. If I was deep in code, this would be pretty useless.
First off, thanks for disagreeing constructively. I was hoping somebody would argue with sources that Haskell has gotten better for practical use. It's a really cool language. You've convinced me to give it another look when I have time.

> OCaml build systems usually are a mess of makefiles or autohell

VERY true. OCamlMakefile (http://www.ocaml.info/ocaml_sources/ocaml-make-6.28.1/README) helps, somewhat.

> In terms of community I think that both languages are about equal.

Really? I've gotten the impression that the Haskell community is larger, or at least writes quite a bit more. (And dons on #haskell is really helpful.)

OTOH, OCaml seems to be more portable. Porting GHC to a new platform seems quite a bit more difficult than porting OCaml; its separation of byte- and native compilation helps considerably. (This may or may not be as important to you.) Also, OCaml doesn't need to do as many advanced things for optimization.

All other things aside, I still think that Haskell is probably easier to learn if you are familiar with OCaml first (which was the original question): Haskell requires you to understand several new ideas upfront before you can do much of anything, whereas in OCaml you can pick up functional programming and how to work with the type system before learning to work with lazy evaluation and monads / purity. (You can also use monads in OCaml, Scheme, etc., of course.)
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Remember that running a business is about risk -- making decisions with imperfect information.

There are lots of risks. If you get tied up too much in worrying about them all you won't get anything accomplished.

I think part of maturing is being able to sort out what problems to act on and what to ignore. This is probably an acquired taste. In other words, take as much criticism as you can and then ignore them. Over time, you'll be able to deal with more and more negativity without it screwing you up. That's where you want to be -- able to handle all of the possible problems and still being optimistic about what you're doing. That's the spot you can grow from.

But heck if I would want a dozen or more people critiquing me all the time. I'd rather use a forum like this every now and then to critique the big issues instead of getting a running stream of advice.
Maybe people haven't wanted to duplicate everything that has been on reddit:
http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/xmq0/what_reall...
Lay review of computational neuroscience: modeling the mind
Should've outsourced it.
It is surprising that this can be profitable, but if you value your time at anything above $20/hr and this saves you a few hours a week, this is certainly worth it to you if the work done is at a high enough quality level.
Mikel Evins about the Lisp-based Newton OS.
I've been working on a pre-2008 Mac Pro for a year now. I have noticed that I often have headaches, and this is not a regular occurrence for me.

Of course it has not rained in Johannesburg, South Africa yet... it's a few weeks overdue and my sinus might be at fault.

But I am slightly concerned.
Rethinking the Office - Dutch Design
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Programming Celebrities - who do pg, Joel, raganwald, Norvig, etc remind you of?
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Does 'increasing the supply of money' fix this?
Mark Pilgrim on clickjacking browser vulnerability
Right. So these Mac Pros are releasing trace amounts of benzene, which may cause cancer or death in high doses. Nothing like a little sensationalism early in the morning.
The best part:

Ironically, the best example of "clickjacking" is the download page for the NoScript extension, which uses it for good rather than evil. Thanks to some fancy JavaScript (search for "installer"), Giorgio embeds the addons.mozilla.org download page for NoScript in an IFRAME on his own page on noscript.net, sets the IFRAME to "opacity:0" (an attack vector that Robert O'Callahan specifically warned about), scrolls the embedded addons.mozilla.org page to the top corner of its "Add to Firefox" button, and sets the z-index of the IFRAME to 100. Thus, the IFRAME is floating (due to "z-index:100") invisibly (due to "opacity:0") over Giorgio's own "Install Now" button (due to the positioning of the IFRAME element itself). When you think you're clicking the button on noscript.net you are actually clicking the button on addons.mozilla.org. What's the difference? By default, Firefox treats addons.mozilla.org as a trusted download site, so it immediately pops up the extension installation dialog instead of blocking the installation with an infobar saying "Firefox prevented this site (noscript.net) from installing software on your computer." From a user experience standpoint, this is great -- one less click to download and install an extension. From a security standpoint, this is incredibly scary -- the end user has no idea they're interacting with a third-party site.
I should outsource surfing news.yc.
I would like to use this as an opportunity to encourage people to stay away from foods with potassium/sodium benzoate as a preservative. This nasty stuff actually has potential to form benzene in foods. Don't poison yourself.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benzene_in_soft_drinks
Apple TV can run Boxee, XBMC with new USB flash installer
StumbleUpon actually a decent business, ditching the toolbar requirement
I've heard, that for their honours year in an undergrad degree, people who get a 2A are more successful than people who get a first. One reason a 2A graduate gave is that it closes them out of the esoteric, idealistic academic life of chasing perfection. Also, in practice, if you aren't comfortable with your head in the clouds, being able to effortlessly hold abstract arguments in your head, you won't be attracted to it. My high school was streamed, and the "top" class was a little airy-headed.

I think another reason might be that if you aren't quite as intelligent, the thing you learn is school is how to make an effort - and that skill is more valuable than any of the subject matter. This is related to whether you believe one is born smart/dumb, or you believe that your intelligence is affected (or even, effected) by your efforts:
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=the-secret-to-raising-sm...

Also, for a start-up, if you are intelligent enough to work things out, but only with great effort, then you are: (1). dumb enough to identify with the problems of ordinary people (customers/users) (2). capable enough to do something about it. The reason I stress the "dumb" in (1) is because I pride myself on being a member of this group (especially when I'm frustrated by something that the really smart people genuinely think is "obvious" and "trivial" - their intelligence sets them apart so much that they are incapable of helping ordinary people).

I think there's another factor, that being extremely capable and talented relative to your peers can make it harder for you be aware of, to acknowledge, and to appreciate the unknown - that nature's imagination is greater than your imagination (Feynman).

Of course, some extraordinarily capable people don't fall prey to any of these dangers - and they really accomplish things.
I still don't know many people that like working with RDF. The ideas are pretty simple, but I feel like they've been poorly conveyed and are hiding behind a veil of ontology terminology. In the Directed Edge webservices API I debated supporting it (and may still add such in the future) but instead went with using a much simpler to read / write self-rolled XML format.

The problem is that RDF adoption assumes that people know how to work with RDF ... or honestly, even get what it really is (which I find often isn't the case).

Another thing that seems to be confused by this article is that "semantic" has two very different meanings in current web technology. In one case it's semantic analysis, in another it's structured data.
I will try it out and report later.
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"IP addresses are unique numbers that identify each computer connected to the internet."
"Philosophically." With Apple, they had mechanisms of corporate governance to simply declare a standardization plan and follow it, and require developers to follow suit.

Linux, not so much.
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The first CS department I was in didn't have quals. You had to maintain a 3.7 GPA over all course work to be admitted as a Ph.D. candidate, so grades did matter.

I wish I had started out in departments like some of you described. I started doing research my first year, and my grades suffered for it. I got three of those Bs, and I had to take an extra course just to be admitted as a Ph.D. candidate in that program. Luckily, I have since transferred to a different school.
Thanks this is actually very helpful to see the actual responses these folks give back to generic requests like the ones you asked.
Do you care about security?
If you're an early-stage startup, be careful with the CTO role. Make sure they can add value THROUGHOUT your operations, as oppose to "evangelizing" about your product. Too much time designing/feature-creep, and not enough time polishing/productizing/documenting == death.

Make sure your product does a few things but does them better than anyone else. Define your core competency and stick to it, establish a name for yourself, then begin stacking on features to distance yourself while competitors play catchup.

Any product with a feature list 10 feet wide but only a 1 foot deep, is still a baby pool. So guess what happens when a potential customer dives in head first during diligence? For some hackers, it may explain why they can't close a deal.