skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
But back to laziness. A great programmer is lazy because he or she prefers thinking through a solution to solve a problem rather than hacking through it, which is way too much effort. Dick Vile, a developer I met at FAME Software, a company founded by Larry Rafsky, put it this way: "What do I use to do my programming? A pencil." Thinking things through, coming up with a great design and then doing the coding is the way a real smart, lazy programmer does things.

The article is interesting on the whole, but this point falls flat on its face, in my humble opinion. Some up-front thinking is always required, but aiming to have the whole thing thought through before you start coding is terribly wasteful - if only because you will always get (sometimes quite important) parts of it wrong because non-trivial systems are too complicated to hold in your head in their entirety while creating a new design.

Also, he's only got one third of the picture with laziness. As Larry Wall said, the *three greatest qualities of a programmer are laziness, impatience, and hubris ( http://cranked.me/2008/07/laziness-impatience-hubris-three-g... ).

Humility is in direct contradiction with one of them and in indirect contradiction with another. I personally feel that those are still more important qualities than humility when it comes to being a great programmer - which, I hasten to add, is very different from being a great designer... that requires far more humility.
> I was informed by the local county government that the cable operator given the franchise contract was technically required to serve my area but opted instead of doing so to pay a small fine each year in order to skip us.

In other words, govt agreed on your behalf to ensure that you wouldn't have broadband and you think that govt will fix that problem?
I agree. "Code" may not mean much to non-technical people. Something like "no programming" might be more meaningful, although I'm wondering if you could even leave it out altogether.
A Command Line Tool for Loading CouchDB Documents
I know I should respond to the content of this article, but:

Dick Vile, a developer I met at FAME Software

Dick Vile? That has to be a punk rock singer.

Edit: Ok, a comment on content. Perhaps I'm expecting too much from Forbes - who had any idea they publish columns on software? - but really, an article called "The Humble Developer" that goes on about the 1970s and doesn't mention Dijkstra... just really.

http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD03xx/EWD340....
That sounds like a really interesting idea, why don't you build it?

A few months ago I had an idea for automatically forcing people to submit story's to sub groups as the sight grows. So it starts as a base line then it's a Funny, then it's Funny, picture then it's Funny, picture, cat etc.
And at each level people can automatically weigh how much they like each sub group. Then set the homepage as the average weight people give each sub group. Then redit started adding sub redits and I realized it was an easy idea to copy.
Collective intelligence pioneer Doug Engelbart hailed
Not sure what that has to do with his main point that it's not the internet which is full, but our attention span.
Your Web 2.0 App is a Security Threat
Chip Database for Animals
Since it has a neighborhood function, i.e. doesn't select from the global population, I'd say it's a form of tabu search.
But, as the Dalai Lama said, it's easy to confuse happiness with pleasure, and it's not always easy to understand the difference.
Bacteria Make Better Alcohol Fuels
Appcelerator Raises $4.1 Million for Open Source RIA Platform
Arbitrage Conspiracy
The arbitrage conspiracy is ready to launch on the 10th of December.

But what the heck Arbitrage Conspiracy is? No body know details about it except few guys.The only thing we know about it is that it has something to do with CPA arbitrage.
Happy Birthday Mouse | TechJaws
I didn't dispute the potential of Objective-C being better and more useful. What I said, is that although Objective-C may be better it never got more popular than the original.

Therefore although their effort with what they call Objective-J may be worthwhile, it's certain it will never go mainstream.

One significant reason? It runs toooo slow on IE. IF it ever gets fast, maybe more people will give it a shot.
The initial investment with LEDs is much higher than with incandescents, so it might make sense to include a power-conditioning driver.
What exactly does this study mean by "Google using consumer bandwidth"? Is this the same old bullshit about pipe owners who want site owners to pay twice for bandwidth?
I like one big file of to do items and miscellaneous notes, and Google Docs is good for that, for me. With Google Docs, you can send an email to yourself and it will be converted into a Google document. Here's the link:

http://docs.google.com/DocAction?action=updoc&hl=en

The subject line becomes the filename, and the body of the message goes into the document.

It would be perfect for me if it did one thing differently. If you send two emails with subject "To Do" and different message body, you get two files named "To Do." I want the second message appended to the first document. Maybe they'll offer that sometime.
As Clay Shirky would point out, the issue here is filter failure. 15 years ago, you might have been able to understand the stuff on the internet - but what about all the newspapers and books written? Or music made?

I doubt it. This problem isn't new. You're always at the knee of the curve as you go up an exponential.
Gvke - Kenn Renner at AustinFireSale.com Annouces Below Market Austin and Lakeway
Great article.

"The good news is that I dont get the impression that the averaqe HackerNews reader is in the situation of being at the whims of the idiots like mentioned in the article."

Have you seen my gold plated Macbook Air?

All kidding aside, it's amazing the sort of crap people think they need to buy when they reach a certain level of income.
"No one goes there any more, it's too crowded" - Yogi Berra
By my reckoning, that makes Ruby 1.9/Yarv the same kind of speed as Python. (At the slow end of the scale, but nothing to be ashamed of any more.)
This is pretty cool. Would be even more interesting to see the full distribution on a plot.
How to bypass Megavideo time limit in two fast steps
I like Raymond Smullyan's strategy for arguing with a solipsist:

Only I exist.
Absolutely correct. Only I exist!

As far as philosophies go, I also like his "Materialist Mystic" stance. (Not Raymond's personal philosophy. He just thinks it's a neat idea.) A big unspoken assumption of many materialists is that they could understand everything if they'd bother to. But even Richard Feynman said that hardly anyone really understood Quantum Mechanics. I'm sure there are innumerable things out there that could be understood in rational terms, but which are not understood yet. I guess that last one is my version of Faith.
The stupid filter (http://stupidfilter.org/main/) is out there, time to start using it?
Learn Best Practices for Designing, Coding, and Distributing Python Software
Why? Mathematical abstractions are leak-free, and so are a lot of computer abstractions. What's wrong with emphasizing the leakiness in some cases?
TimesWidgets, another neat NYT tech product, launching today
Pay the Designer
NaCl is very stable. Just don't get it wet.
I did not know Eric Von Hippel's work was a source of some of the agile methodologies. That is interesting, as the guys in Portland (Dave Thomas et. al) seem to be the biggest influences in design right now. Nice to hear from the originator.
The lack of a class system and an import system means that a lot of libraries reinvent the wheel

I consider the lack of a class system a feature, not a bug, and Javascript itself one of the most fortunate accidents in computing history.

We're really lucky that Brendan Eich happened to have read some SICP and been in a Scheme-enthusiasm phase when he got the job of making a language for the web. Because of this, Javascript contains the messenger RNA of Lisp and Smalltalk and their regular, ultra-dynamic approach to programming - and because of that, it's taking over the world.

Of course it's half-baked in some ways, some of which go back to the C-syntax that was politically imposed on it. But we owe the world of web apps, full of incredible creations that go light years beyond anything that the browser was originally designed to do, to the dynamicness and extensibility that did make it into the language. (And that took 10 years for people to begin to figure out.) This recent talk about libraries and language extensions built on top of Javascript is missing one essential point: it's because of its expressiveness that we can build all these interesting abstractions.

When you consider how many historical and political accidents have gone against this style of programming, how poorly understood it has been and how nearly everyone thinks that to make things "serious" they have to redo it in concrete, we're really very fortunate that even one accident - and one of the biggest - went in our favor.

And I do think it was more or less an accident. Lord knows Eich has since spent years trying to turn the thing into Java. To support "serious development" don't you know.
Yes, much better. The total submissions/total points are skewed by sites (TC) and blogs (CodingHorror) that post every day, sometimes multiple times per day. If you get enough at-bats, you'll get a lot of hits.
The ultimate choice of the youth: Ed Hardy clothing
TC reviews of startups are the most reliable, in the sense that a) there will always be one (TC is thorough) and b) the quality and viewpoint is fairly consistent so they're more valuable because you know the bias, as opposed to a review from some random site.
An exceptional case, but he makes a good point:
(from http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/2007/c... )

At a critical time, when I was contemplating leaving Harvard as a faculty member and going to Utah, he, being familiar with my self-sufficiency, counseled me that I could do good science anywhere. The move turned out to be a good decision. In Utah I had the luxury to pursue long-term projects that were not readily possible at Harvard, which, in too many cases had become a bastion of short-term gratification.
The Way We'll Watch Movies
That article couldn't make up its mind.

First it endorses XP and Agile's frequent user interaction and iterative development over big upfront design. And then it criticizes XP and Agile for not doing enough design.

In summary, extremism is bad, so be moderate and smart.
Second consecutive Illinois governer to serve jail time.  Well Done.
Is TechCrunch a leading VC/Startup news source? I'm not trying to be a smartass. It always seemed like tabloid trash to me. The articles are poorly researched, poorly written and often consist of almost nothing of substance once you get beyond an attention-grabbing headline. I would imagine that's a consequence of the often misleading or, at worst, incorrect articles they have a tendency to publish. As far as I'm concerned they have zero credibility.
This could be a huge boon to casual multiplayer gaming. You may be able to implement games that are as fast as desktop clients, but which require zero installation. (Once the plugin is installed the first time, of course.)

The same benefits would also be a huge boon to browser office apps.

Actually, this is the architecture that should be used to distribute plugins, period.
Cheerful nihilism.
Yes, if she wants one. Security is always in part a question of magnitude & probability. Both are quite a bit higher for the POTUS than for J. Random CEO.
In Russian http://spring.jumpidea.com/2008/12/paul-graham-divergence.ht...
'National security reasons'? More like they don't want info being seen by the public, due to the Presidential Records Act.
Trash Cans that Send Text Messages, from BigBelly Solar
This is how Facebook achieves scale without sustaining damage from trolls.
How spyware nearly sent a teacher to prison
Microsoft is an 800 lb gorilla, but one located in another part of town, or even another country. If you do web development, and you're not using .net/CLR/C#, then you're probably not developing or deploying on Windows.

What proportion of startups run Windows? It's a good deal lower than those running Linux or OS X -- so much so that Microsoft have launched a "BizSpark" service where startups can use their software without charge (see http://www.includipedia.com/blog/2008/11/05/microsoft-bizspa... )

So if you want to develop with PHP, MySQL, Ruby, Rails, Django, etc, then you should bear in mind that Windows support is probably not going to be as good as Linux or OS X support.
YouTube - Meet The Real Gordon Gekko
This also seems like a pretty good strategy. I really need to take that OCaml book off the shelf.
E.Factor : Building Your Business
Minnesota students compete well against world in math, science
This information is SO false. I have no idea how it would end up in WSJ.
For those who use IB:
How long have you been using them? Do you use their client or their API? Is it alright to use both, in parallel? People complain about their customer service; have you had any problems? Is it easy to transfer money to/from your IB account?
The Social Life of Routers
Beautiful and inspiring Designers Quotes
I didn't start my first business until my early 30s and found the mix of energy and experience just perfect (much easier, in my case, than it likely would have been in my 20s). Try to avoid the "wasting the prime of my life" argument -- one way or another, that time is going to pass.

If you want to start a business and are ready for it, start it. If you'd rather do something else, do that instead.

You're not wasting time if you genuinely enjoy how it is being spent.
@aristus, this is the same link that was here - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=386468 . I think they're trying to fool the general public. how sick.
The full study was published today as a .PDF document.

http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2009/2009001.pdf
Actually, there is something of an anti-solipsist position. Thomas Nagel discusses it in his classic "The View From Nowhere." If solipsism might be regarded as holding that nothing exists other than what is perceived from one's _subjective_ viewpoint, then anti-solipsism holds that nothing exists other than the _objective_ "viewpoint." What the anti-solipsist would deny is his own perspective as a subject in the world, which as one might imagine, is as impossible as holding a solipsist position. Nagel's book strives to reconcile these seemingly irreconcilable perspectives -- subjective and objective. Recommended reading.
I can't stand Windows, but wanted to point something out to all blind Windows haters out there: look at Vista vs Ubuntu numbers. Windows beats Linux running MRI by 10-50% in nearly all tests [when they pass] which aligns perfectly with my own observations.

Certainly such big difference can't be explained by more effective system calls. I attribute this to Microsoft's superior C/C++ compiler. Back in my C++ loving days I played with various compilers regularly, and MSVC has always been the most optimizing, and kept advancing rapidly from version to version. It also compiles 2-3 times faster than GCC if I remember correctly... uhhh I miss it. :-)

Also his JRuby startup time is inaccurate. No way JVM starts in under a second: it's more like 2 full seconds on his hardware. More likely he had some of JVM in the filesystem cache. Vista/OSX will pre-fetch JVM modules even after you reboot (not sure about Linux) if you run Java software and especially if you have 8GB of RAM...
That's why you look at sharpe ratio, rather than absolute return.
I'll die anyway so why worry?
Indeed. Perhaps I can explain a little more what she discovered, and why this connection to QFT is almost surely nonsense.

The flag manifold in question comes from matrix groups; basically, consider some subset of 3x3 matrices which satisfy a certain property. I.e., certain types of transformations of a 3d space. While the space of 3x3 matrices has 3x3=9 dimensions, subsets can have fewer dimensions (in this case, 6).

The two-dimensional projections she discovered are functions of the 6 dimensional matrices.

So here is the occams razor explanation for what is happening. Inside the bee's head is an ODE (ordinary differential equation) solver, basically an analog computer. Just think of the ODE solver as a complicated timer, but with output depending on both time and some hidden variable. These are common objects in biology, and don't require many neurons.

The output of the ODE solver is wired to some neurons which reduce 6 variables to 2, according to the formula she discovered.

This is a fantastic discovery, a triumph of applied math. But the connection to QFT is almost surely coincidence: QFT uses symmetries of matrix groups over 3 dimensions, and the bee (which lives in 3 dimensions) also does.

This phenomenon is called universality. Certain objects repeat across diverse areas simply because it is the only logical way (or the most common logical way) that things could happen.
This completely contradicts what I was taught about being a lazy programmer.

Laziness, to me, means that you only type the code that you need to (essentially the DRY principal, Don't Repeat Yourself.) Beginner programmers are 'eager', they want to continually pound the keyboard until the program does what they want it to do. Lazy (senior?) programmers carefully decide each line of code that gets included, because they don't want to have to repeat themselves or throw out code that wasted their time.

Maybe someone can clarify my thoughts better. But being lazy does not mean waiting to code until you have the entire idea in your head. Programmers who do that typically miss the mark of what their users want.
This critique raises some interesting points:
http://www.ortholog.com/archive/in_response/bees_arent_quant...

"""... Just because it takes a lot of maths doesn't mean it isn't easy to do. Mathematics is a (formal language for the) description of events, not the other way round. Take integration for example, the mathematical operation of finding the integral e.g. finding the area under a curve specified by a quadratic equation. There are humans with 1.75kg of brain tissue that can't do that, so it must be hard, right? However, it takes just a handful of electronic components to devise a circuit that outputs the integral. Can we really say for certain that there isn't a simple enough circuit you can build out of bee neurones to compute the angles encoded in the waggle dance? Of course not. It was recently shown by Elbing and coworkers that we can build some electronic components from single molecules. It isn't intrinsically hard; it's just hard to write down.

A bee doesn't need "equipment sensitive to the quantum-mechanical world"; it just needs visual acuity and some simple circuitry. Well, two circuits. First, an encoder that takes inputs from its primitive memory, recently stimulated by the food discovery and the excited journey home noting sun/horizon landmarks, and outputs the dance. And secondly, a decoder to recognise the dance before its cute little compound eyes and compute the relevant angles for navigation. It sounds complicated but it isn't. Consider this: how complex are the mathematical operations required for a human to catch a thrown ball? Pretty complex and likely to take up a lot of paper--but, crucially, they don't take up a lot of brain circuitry if such things can, after Elbing (or more properly, billions of years before Elbing), be built of a handful of molecules. Just because a rational, sentient, conscious process struggles to achieve a thing doesn't make it a hard thing to do. Doing is easier than computing, for most values of "do" and "compute"."""
God knows how they're going to make a business out of this. They raised 4.1M, so there's definitely an expectation of revenue.

Adobe has more resources and a significant head start. My money is on AIR.

(Full disclosure: I'm biased- Appcelerator recently laid off 3 of my good friends)
A very important point is comprehensibility of any voice and readability of all the text in your video. Some demo videos I've seen are not too great at these.
Turn General Motors into a Public School
I disagree with this interpretation of anti-solipsism, although since I don't exist, it's okay if you find my argument lacking.

I feel that other people still exist as subjective entities, just that the validation of my subjectivity is lacking, ie, while it seems obvious that every human throughout the existance of mankind has had the subjective experience of existing, I disbelieve that any reasonable percentage of them believe that I have had the subjective experience of existing. Therefore, while it seems to me that I have the subjective experience of existing, that's just an artifact of semantics. In reality for 99.99999999999% of the cosmos (actually the number is zero) I do not, in fact, exist.

But I'm sure Nagel is more on the money. Sounds like a good read.
What additional overhead? You seem to not understand how such things work, which is odd given your apparent concern.

Please do familiarize yourself with the subject, and please don't post off-topic comments.

http://www.eff.org/files/filenode/att/SER_klein_decl.pdf
http://www.eff.org/files/filenode/att/SER_marcus_decl.pdf
Tell me you remember the timeless astalavista.box.sk ...
After the NYC cafeteria hours were cut, The Google was hungry. Mmm, taxpayer money. Gobble gobble.
Some examples of Software Transactional Memory in Haskell
Damn Useful: When You Forget to type Sudo
This is something I've never understood. To sue for that amount of money, wouldn't they need to somehow prove that those 10 songs caused 2.5 million in damages or lost earnings or... something?
Mostly yes. The another thing that can be added to your last paragraph is that frequently the code speaks for itself, and suggests you solutions to the problems.
18,000? I thought this was about 100,000
The install process kicks AIRs butt. The sample app tweetanium downloaded as a DMG. I dropped it in my apps folder, opened it, clicked the customary OSx "you got this from the internet", warning and boom I was twitting.

Comepare this to AIR:
•flash is required
•specific flash version required
•install air runtime
•install air app
•present REALLY scary warning to user (causes massive dropoffs in the installation process)
•require 200-400$ cert from dev to make that warning 5% less scary.
To me, one of the more interesting aspects of that was that the ruby version optimised for reduced memory usage got a 2x speedup.

That makes sense in terms of cpu cache misses. Has anyone run any numbers to see how gcc -Ospace compares with -O2 on recent hardware?
I'm glad that we're starting to see realistic and absolute comparisons.

And I wonder how many people are surprised to learn that JRuby is doing so well right now.
That risk you speak of may not be discounted in the price, but rather in the implied volatility. You'll see that after major earnings reports/announcements there is an IV crush on the options board.

You can game this by looking at historical IV for pre-earnings and see if the current is over/under. You can then sell straddles or strangles if you think the price will stay in that area.

It's even better for GOOG because they always release earnings right before options expiration, so there's a ton of voodoo going on in their price.
GED ged.com
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She should sue Microsoft for negligence and the school for using misconfigured computers and not educating her properly.