skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>Eh, I appreciate that, really, but I don't want to stop caring. I want it to be better.

Corpses write no code. shrugs

> If it was just one company that consistently produced crap software, it would be easy to say that there's probably something broken at that company.

Anything below the top, say, 2-5% of software is guaranteed to be shit because all the programmers below the top 2-5% are shit. There is no grand movement or methodology to be had here.

It's a people problem.

>For example, I might be writing a Jooma migration tool right now to fix the stupid 1.5->1.7 issues, and I'd be happy to release it and even support it for as long as people need it, but first I have to figure out what the hell is wrong with the wireless drivers in Linux on the new laptop...

This is why I use Linux for workstations where it seems more comfortable, and my Mac for my mobile machine as it's more tolerant of network/display disruption. I'm not trying to troll or be a Mac fanboy here, I prefer working in Linux as I am simply more productive and it's my production OS. But, a laptop that is on the move plays to the strengths of OS X sufficiently that I am travelling right now and using my Mac instead of my Linux laptop.

You're going to have to accept that if you use the wrong software for the wrong problems, you're going to keep getting poked in the eye. You're using bad hammers and complaining about how bad hammers are.

There's a distinction to be made, an important one.

>Now, here's the other half of it: support people are not your janitors.

Open source projects don't have "support people", they have contributors and devs that volunteer their time. I worked for a MOTU and volunteered in the #ubuntu channel on FreeNode for years. I've done thousands of man-hours of support. I know exactly how bad software is, and how bad the situation is.

I'm on your side here, but until you start solving the problems one at a time, nothing changes.

My apartment gets cleaned one trash bag at a time.

>The harder my job gets, the less likely I am to contribute.

Something's gotta give. Stuff like Joomla registers as shitware in the circles I go in.

Complaining about things like Joomla, PHP, Drupal, Outlook, etc. doesn't really register with me.

Might as well buy a Kia and complain about how terrible the state of automobiles are. The author had much stronger points than you have. You work with some terrible stuff, period.
For the consumers, there's the various state agencies. In Wisconsin, you don't contact the BBB, you contact the department of Agriculture and Consumer Protection. Those guys shut down a regional cellphone provider because of some complaints I and a few others filed about billing practices, etc. They responded to my web form submission with a half-hour very interested phone call.

I've heard similar stories in other states. I've always been told, as a consumer, to avoid the BBB and go through the state agencies.
If people were randomly walking into traffic at the same rate that they're taking content that doesn't belong to them I think we'd be pretty quick to support swift and decisive action. Everyone cries (me included) when some poor sap has to take a million dollar beating for downloading a handful of MP3s. If 1000 people losing the internet after being warned already once helps to stop that from happening, and simultaneously starts getting the public to take this issue seriously, I think everyone is better off for it. When you get a warning about this issue, you educate yourself about it, stop doing what you're not supposed to, and you move on. How long do we have to side with ignorance (meaning that people don't know they're doing something wrong) over fairness to content owners?
Never title something with a question that can be answered "No."
I would consider supporting a project like that. Im in the area and i have alot of classic hardware and a fair amount of unix experience, there was a cool 2600 scene a long time ago but its died out, the 2 hacker spaces in existence are pretty slick but i feel there is room for a more computer / information centeric hackerspace as well as one that has live-in members. feel free to contact me at evil@iowntheinter.net if you get serious about it
Co-founder here. MobileWorks is a YCS11 company. I can check in from time-to-time to answer any questions HN'ers might have.
I don't follow. Do phones have backup batteries now, or are people too obsessed with texting and tweeting to actually do such a thing anymore?
Given how much more popular automated testing and TDD have become in the past 7 years since that book was published (and much longer for some of the sources cited for those data), I'd be very surprised if we haven't gotten much better at that particular form of testing.

Also I'm quite curious how you can actually count the number of bugs found from each of these methods. Test-after unit testing would even be preventative if you wrote tests immediately after writing the code. If doing that made you think about more edge cases and thus fix up the code then it seems like those bugs would not get counted.

Seems like many of these would have different amounts of a preventative effect that would be difficult to measure....especially if you wanted to isolate their effect from each other.
Silverlight Client
I just finalized the web client of Stockato, a search engine for financial instruments. I'm curious to know how well Silverlight would show up in Mac browsers.

Any comments are welcome. Thank you,

Uri
I am hearing a lot of this too: "You'll get paid when the app is available for sale in Apple's App Store." So ridiculous.
Joypad Turns Your iPhone Into A Remote Control
I just finalized the web client of Stockato, a search engine for financial instruments. I'm curious to know how well Silverlight would show up in Mac browsers.

Any comments are welcome. Thank you,

Uri
脚气知识网
As I understand the paper, the researchers tried both asking programmers to use certain techniques to debug a program with known bugs, then measured the number of bugs they caught against the known total.

In addition they went to larger companies, checked which bug detection techniques they were using and how well each one detected bugs.

I have the gated PDF, email me if you want a copy.
IBuzzPro | Are You Focused On The Price or Prize?
Why not? Isn't it much more honest to ask the question, rather than report it as a fact?

I like this title far more than eg "Reporter discovers likely identity of bitcoin author"
Number of bugs found seems to me a poor metric. Some bugs are much (much) more important than others, and different bug-finding methods will find different kinds of bugs.
NPR should stick to reporting real news.
Any links to an example?
Office space and retail space share the same zoning in most cities (at least Berkeley did, while I lived there), so the problem is likely the landlords.
Promovam creatia literara si cultura
You write tests for it. Really, the complexity of the whole doesn't necessitate complexity of the parts. Hell, I'll go as far to say that a facial recognition algorithm that is a single piece of complex code is also a horribly bad piece of code. And yes, if you are writing that sort of code, it will be hard to test. Because it's bad code.

> or any other sort of real-world code whose operation can't be summed up exactly in two lines of code?

By this, I assume you mean real-world code whose operations consist of 10,000 lines of un-modularized spaghetti code.
So on the server, write the emails to a single file in Dropbox. Like .mbox with markdown level 1 instead of headers. Default input by email, revisions or alternate new via dropbox.
Every now and then I decide I don't like being a programmer anymore. And then I remember its the only thing I'm good at.
>What bothers me about the article is that Fee Fighters is arguing from the point of a victim. Yes BBB has a harmful code of conduct, but Fee Fighters had a chance to review it and signed up for that.

The thing is, every agreement written by a lawyer has some overly broad "I can screw you" clauses. Heck, this one doesn't even read that badly. I mean, it sounds like they are reserving the right to stop people from associating the BBB with broadly offensive causes. I mean, if you are supplying the KKK with robes, I'd rather you not have my logo on your website. That seems pretty reasonable. If you turn around and then use that clause against someone who is legitimately criticizing you, you are a scumbag and should be called out on it.
Tom Williams: Hired by Apple at 14
How did you make that shortcut in eclipse?
I was not aware that you could inject content with CSS. Cool.
wow.. this is incredibly juvenile. you should need to appreciate other people's opinions too apart from yours
> Since pocket calculators would not have been available to the typical student in 1967

Is a slide rule allowed?

One of my eternal regrets is throwing out my set of slide rules in the 80s when I decided calculators were here to stay (mainly because I got to play with an HP-41C, which introduced me to programming and, well, here I am).
Good point. If Arrington and co are that blatantly corrupt out in the open, who'd want anything to do with them when the doors are closed?
The line

> "I'm not Satoshi"

reminded me of this: http://pbfcomics.com/archive_b/PBF045-Wise_Shitashi.jpg

Wonder if Satoshi likes PBF..
GNOME can actually mount remote folders on startup / on demand using SSH/SCP/FTP/whatever. I had a relatively non-technical friend go for this approach and it worked really well.

It's actually a really kickass feature
The cynic can only take pleasure in saying "I told you so," but can never take credit for any improvement, which does occasionally happen against all odds.
Made a bookmarklet for it here:
http://steve.io/debugcss/
It makes me wonder how this is not extortion? Pay up or we'll make your life miserable and/or more expensive.
Author did write world's most popular iOS app. Could be something in there to learn from.
Aakreeti Karki
Sacrifice and discomfort is not a MEANS to anything, it does however imply delayed gratification that is mostly unpleasant and sends many fleeing to the nearest consulting firm. This would make sense if you actually read the article, which describes many disillusioned ivy's unwilling to sacrifice a comfortable lifestyle for what could otherwise be more personally enriching and meaningful work.

I'm not even sure what you're trying to argue here—nobody wants the rights to your intelligence. But if you take a step back, you can see that every one of us has benefitted greatly from others' intelligent contributions to humanity and we can choose to either keep that wheel spinning or put ourselves at the mercy of others' history-making. If you want to use your tech idols as a yardstick for morality and virtue, you ought to look a little closer.

"I mean, we’re constantly taking things. It’s a wonderful, ecstatic feeling to create something that puts it back in the pool of human experience and knowledge.”
-STEVE JOBS

Some of my favorite quotes, however, are from the mouth of Napoleon:

"All my life I have sacrificed everything—comfort, self-interest, happiness—to my destiny."

"Men are moved by two levers only: fear and self interest."
This appears to be a denial by the person in question: http://www.scss.tcd.ie/~clearm/bitcoin.html

I did the same undergrad as the guy. I have to say, I'd be really impressed if he put together Bitcoin just as he was finishing college. I would have guessed it was designed by someone, or group, with many years experience developing crypto infrastructure. But who knows.

The bit at the end of the article, about the wallets being encrypted, seems completely spurious to me, and no evidence that the reporter found the right guy (which the reporter seems to intend it to be).
I'm curious how this will work with Play 2.0, which will be sbt-based.
Sometimes it's easy to forget that software development is a fundamentally human endeavor and will reflect all that is right and wrong with the humans involved.
Great, does this mean Growl will stop being installed by 3rd party apps without consent?
The story is one which I do not feel is appropriate to post publicly at this point. If you really feel like hearing it, email me at myHNusername@gmail.com and I _might_ oblige.

It is both the cussing and the use of the word scam. While I don't generally cuss myself, I have no problem with people speaking or writing like that, but I feel that it does frame the post as "I'm angry and have an anti-BBB agenda" rather than "I am a blogger trying to investigate a potential issue."
"The writer also notes that Satoshi typically uses British (rather than American) spellings.

So he narrows the field to people from the UK at Crypto2011."

Not Singapore, NZ, Australia, Hong Kong, India or any number of prior British colonies that use British English and spellings instead of American? (How about China? Not sure what English version they use, but wouldn't be surprised it's Brit).

Unles there was no one from any of those countries at Crypto2011, then it looks like he excluded up to 2/3rds of the solution space.

Also, I wouldn't be surprised at a skilled cryptologist who wanted to stay incognito faking his spellings to throw people off. For example, I'm not a cryptologist, am American, am not trying to be incognito, and enjoy using British slang and spellings occasionally anyway. And this guy Clear sounds like he's enjoying taking the piss out of the reporter.
Social INJUSTICE
The dichotomy you present ("ask the question" vs. "report it as fact") is false. If you're phrasing it as a question, it's either because the answer is "No" or because you aren't capable of answering the question. Just tell me what you know instead of asking a question neither of us can answer.

The question headline is more compelling, but that's because it creates a false expectation that the question might be answered. It lends itself just as well to sensationalistic headlines like "Did Obama just give the order to nuke France?"
Rettetang GHD
Anything below the top, say, 2-5% of software is guaranteed to be shit because all the programmers below the top 2-5% are shit. There is no grand movement or methodology to be had here.
It's a people problem.

Disagree. I don't think 95-98% of programmers are idiots. However, a lot of programmers (even some very smart ones) are terrible architects and have no sense of the big picture. Moreover, a lot of projects start out well but turn to shit through neglect and departure from the original architecture.

95-98% of software architecture is deplorable, but that's not because our industry is has 20+ idiots for every decently smart person. It's a lot more subtle than that. A big part of the problem is that most of professional programming is so disconnected and often alienating that a lot of programmers never learn architecture and its importance; the only way to really learn it is to support your own creation and experience first-hand the consequences of your original decisions. A lot of programmers never have that experience.

In sum, I think the general shittiness of the software industry and of architecture has a lot more to do with the fact that few programmers never have the experiences that will make them any good, than it does with a lack of talent. It takes 10,000 hours of deliberate practice to become good at something, but most of what most programmers do for work is not "deliberate practice"; it's repetitive drudge work that they often don't have the creative control to automate.
Node is marketed towards people with Javascript experience to a large degree, it seems to me (I could be wrong). People with Javascript experience more than likely have it via writing for a browser. A browser functions functions identically to Node: the event loop. So, those coming from writing Javascript in a browser will merely carry through their knowledge of development practices to Node, meaning they intrinsically will write event based code.

Or at least that line of thought makes sense to me.
The tweet is by Daeken, my grandparent, wrt to this thread.
There have been a number of papers showing that total number of bugs is a pretty good heuristic for code quality.

I agree that it's hard to tell which is picking out more important bugs. My guess is that less prominent papers by the same authors get into the topic in more detail.
What part of Adobe's past are you referring to? The part where they support open web standards? Or are you merely referring to Flash, that component that was doing more for "standards" back when browsers weren't.

How quickly people forget.
If not, software that does the same for plain text might work.
>>10 minutes of looking over code by another developer will find more bugs than days of testing

I find this surprising. Unless you are talking about new developers. Automated test cases should be more than unit test cases. They should include system wide test cases as much as possible. i.e. For a game you would write test cases on the physics engine. The physics engine includes collision detection and collision response. Of course, you would also have test cases for each of those modules independently.
If you had brain, you would know that JavaScript only has 52 bits of integer precision. Anything bigger than Fib(~83) is not accurate number and waste of time in JS.
>Not Singapore, NZ, Australia, Hong Kong, India or any number of prior British colonies that use British English and spellings instead of American?

Not to mention Ireland.
Despite these reasons, and their likely validity, the fact that the protests are spreading, broadening and deepening across the country, leads me to believe that they may accomplish a bit more than the author expects. They're a more hopeful sign than the Tea Party, which has mostly been coopted by this point.
>>Maybe if your code is "Hello World", but what if your code is a motion search, or a facial recognition algorithm, or a band-pass filter, or any other sort of real-world code whose operation can't be summed up exactly in two lines of code?

Then you break the problem down as much as possible so that you know exactly what should be the expected output for the expected input. You have to keep breaking the problem down until it becomes obvious how to automate the tests. Otherwise it'll be really hard to write good, clean, modular code.
Sounds an awful lot like he's talking about OpenTTD, a "clone" of Transport Tycoon Deluxe that has some "interesting" history even aside from the media assets.
No argument there. You can always count on Helvetica, Arial, Georgia and Verdana. Reliable old workhorses. And boring beyond belief.
One of my CS professors claimed he had a script to analyze all of his students' programming assignments to find possible instances of cheating. I have no idea how extensive his algorithm was: it could have been anything from a simple whitespace and variable name normalization to an analysis of the abstract syntax tree. Or he may have just been bluffing.
There are better alternatives out there. I think the company is a little too over hyped, to be honest.
Here is another one - http://www.red-root.com/sandbox/holmes/

HN Discussion - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2489546
Boston Dynamics unwraps military robot AlphaDog
I want to know the TCO of just Oracle's ridiculous empty-string-is-almost-but-not-quite-equivalent-to-NULL VARCHAR2 behaviour.
The thing that the author of this rant and every other rant like it don't understand is that computer science is hard.

While tools like functional programming may indeed deliver on the promise of a 60% code reduction, they have a correspondingly higher barrier to learning. Evolving algorithms? Automatic programming? These problems become theoretically intractable so quickly it's not even funny (I currently do research on a very related problem). He wants compilers to just insert the semicolon for him? I'm glad mechanical engineers of the world don't have the same attitude about nails and screws!

Most of his complaints in truth have nothing to do with computer science at all. They have everything to do with sloppy engineering. There are all sorts of obvious reasons why computer engineering is sloppy. A few examples:

1) Developers for open source project usually are not paid. It's not surprising that documentation is weak.

2) Reliability and turn-key operation are expensive to develop and nobody wants to pay. I'm sure the author of the article doesn't either.

3) Bugs have lower impact. Screw up a building foundation and you might end up in jail. A clunky install process? Probably all that will happen is a scolding and a new issue in the tracker.

4) Things change so fast that standards can't keep up. The same goes for most other engineering frameworks that would solve many of the problems Morris complains about.

We've made and continue to make huge progress in the field of computer science. Computers have and continue to replace people in jobs all over the world. Morris should be happy they haven't replaced his job yet. Not working may sound nice, but having an income is also nice. That has nothing to do with computers.

Computers have made our lives easier. If I went back 10 years and told my younger self what I can do today with just my mobile phone, I doubt my younger self would even believe me.

The problem is not that progress is bad. It's that progress is moving too fast for engineering to keep up with. The state of the art is constantly changing.
>Disagree. I don't think 95-98% of programmers are idiots.

I didn't say that.

> It takes 10,000 hours of deliberate practice to become good at something,

People need to stop re-hashing this. 10,000 hours of deliberate practice is likely but not necessarily going to make you an excellent programmer. I know plenty of programmers in their 40s and older who have that much time in or more that are frankly, garbage.

Investing time is necessary, but insufficient, and there is no one grand unified number that defines all professions for what is necessary to become excellent for every individual.

I know a 60-something whose code output terrifies me and he has a great deal more than 10,000 hours invested in programming.

OTOH, one of the programmers I most deeply respect is a 50-year old woman.

It's hit or miss. In my experience, passion counts more than anything.

>but that's not because our industry is has 20+ idiots for every decently smart person.

Work at a major insurance/something-not-directly-related-to-software company. That's an optimistic ratio.
Atlassian (which recently acquired Bitbucket) is well known forJira/Confluence.

Could it be that if they might use Bitbucket as an entry point to their products? Perhaps with more integration.
Any article that has a question as a title is always answered "no".
>>By this, I assume you mean real-world code whose operations consist of 10,000 lines of un-modularized spaghetti code.

That is the same thing that came to my mind. Indeed, if you write code like that it will be really hard to write automated test cases, debug, maintain, etc. etc.
> where will you host it now?

On any available machine with some free space and an SSH daemon?

You talk about "figuring something else out" like it's some sort of big project. I don't understand that at all. There's no really effective lock-in here, users can take their repos and go anywhere or nowhere with negligible effort. They could even easily maintain a full copy of their repos on some backup machine at all times while using bitbucket or github.
TL;DR: OOGABOOGABOOGA!
I often feel the same way. Also don't forget "the grass is always greener" syndrome.
I half expected this to be an Oracle database that only allowed you to create tables with two columns.
The Solution to Building a Single Cross-Media User Experience
So, an Apple fanatic becomes a VC. Can we all agree we're in a bubble?
From your experience are there any new types of tasks you see on the horizon other than just the standard photo tagging, text recognition, etc?
Five essential cloud-based tools for start-ups