skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Meh. I'm not convinced. I've only read one book on his list of books programmers have actually read and have read more than half of the books (not AOCP or Dragon Book) on the list of book programmers haven't actually read.

I've not even heard of a few of the ones on the first list.

CLRS is a reasonable introduction to computer science, not programming. It starts off with basic concepts of the math in CS and then sorting algorithms -- just like any decent intro to CS course / book.

The C++ Programming Language is definitely not for language implementors. For that there's a (fairly accessible) language specification that's also published in book form, which is also useful as a reference for things which are out of scope for the The C++ Programming Language. It is, however, not a good intro book, and honestly, not a great reference book either. It's just that it's somewhat more comprehensive than other references.
So don't worry about working on his projects; work on your own and make them better!
Is this the panacea for those of us wanting both powerful macros and high(est) performance? Is there already something like this for a language with more support for distributed computation?
Because you know, you <i>are</i> a Rockstar&tm; developer!
I'd rather have my holidays and a recession.
The fact that you can already accomplish what he wants with jQ, and that his proposed solution is to add imperative programming semantics to CSS, one assumes the reasonable response to this is simply a compiler that spits out CSS/JS based on whatever random feature he wants CSS to have.
Do you know what's Google Connect?
http://www.google.com/friendconnect/admin/

It's news because it means Twitter is adhering to a Google-promoted standard, and because this standard is competition of Facebook Connect.
http://developers.facebook.com/news.php?blog=1&story=108

Google vs Facebook is the new battle.
Why? To prevent the psychological damage from being fired in an unfriendly way? I don't know, how about "get over it"?

At the end of the day, fired is fired, no matter if it was friendly or unfriendly.
Larry Wall on Perl
Hello Newt,

Thanks for answering and for forwarding this to people who know GR, this might really help me.

Regarding your first paragraph: I didn't give you my analysis, I only gave you a final answer, so how can you say there's a problem with my analysis? It's more like, there's a problem with your guess of what my analysis was.
I phrased the original question accurately and gave a final answer.

The contradiction you're talking about does happen if you try to switch reference frames without taking note of the acceleration. I didn't try to switch reference frames.
Useful for a band... perhaps less useful for anyone who can write software. If you can write software, then you'll make more money writing software than by doing just about anything else. (Cards on the table: I am automatically skeptical of anybody who suggests "Programmers should be like musicians" because I always hear the whispered insinuation "I should get their stuff like I get my music -- for free".)

I've got a minorly successful blog and people tell me I should go into writing. I think that's insane: do LOTS of marginal work, collect ~8% of the sales of the book from a pretty small number of people. Alternatively, do fairly little marginal work to promote my software, and collect 96% of each purchase price. Which is more than the cost of the book, to boot, because software doesn't have to get sold on some stupid hardcover/softcover basis and then rotated out of the bookstore after 5 months.

Software also scales to infinity if you can get the marketing/advertising done right, which is why I make far more from my sideline than from my day job on a per-hour basis despite doing much, much more impressive work at my day job by any technical measurement.

Similarly, 37signals has a lot of revenue streams. They've got several flavors of software, and several flavors of revenue which next to the software are pocket lint. I mean that in the nicest way possible -- Getting Real probably sold more dollars worth of dead tree than I'll make in the next decade, but in terms of impact on the bottom line, ONE small business buying their medium Basecamp plan for a year equals about SIX HUNDRED books. (PDFs make for a marginally better business -- then you only have to sell 30 copies.)

And you know how big of an audience they would need for advertising to compare with even ~1,000 app subscribers? Egads, it scarcely bears thinking about. (And they command premium rates for their advertising, via the Deck. Most people who think "Egads, I can't charge money -- I'll give it away for free and make it up on the volume!" are locking themselves into low-rate CPM and AdWords ads.)

The job board is a pretty sweet sideline, as far as things go, but unlike the apps it does not scale to infinity. After you get past N listings in a month, for N in the two digit region, your users start to hurt each other's experience of the product.

(The biggest reason for them to do so many things is to keep their name around so as to convince more people to use their web applications, which is where the lion's share of the money is.)
There's also PreScheme, used to implement Scheme48's VM, whose compiler is written in Scheme. It seems that PreScheme differs by providing macros in the PreScheme language rather than requiring the user to write `transformations' in the compiler language (Common Lisp in the case of SC).
Eliminating the Programmer
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A friend of mine worked for a company that thought it would be a good idea to have everyone share the pain. The way they did it however was quite horrible. Every single person was invited into a room and handed identical envelopes. Once you opened the envelope, you found out whether you were fired or not, kind of like a reverse lottery. Of course, no one explained it very well, so everyone thought they were fired and there were a lot of bad feelings among both groups.
Why not just calculate it as an insert trigger but only look at the current day and have a table that stores a running total per item/day. That way you never have to go back to calculate days that are done.

And yes, this is more expensive up front, since you're taking a hit per insert; but your data base is always current.
If you are 36, and have a reasonable chance of living till 70+, a 3% chance of death is basically the same as dieing one year sooner. Is climbing mount Everest worth a year of your life? And I am not talking about extreme old age but reasonably healthy middle years?

Now it might not seem like much, but as I get older I am more willing to take risks because of this stuff. My risk threshold is basically one in 50,000. If it's more risky than that it's just not worth it IMO. At 70 I will probably have a lower threshold but for now I am happy, healthy, and hopefully have many more years ahead so taking 1% death risk seems stupid.
For Emacs: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~maverick/GNUEmacsColorThemeTest/index...
If you can write software, then you'll make more money writing software than by doing just about anything else.

As a musician who can write software, that's exactly what I'm afraid of.
@Twitter: Welcome to Google Friend Connect
IANAL and I am not a founder but I thought the source code basically disappears into a black hole, from a reuse/release perspective. You can't use it. That's what happened with a friend's startup that didn't work out.
Staying Innovative In a Downturn
If he turned down his sarcasm just a bit, more people would actually see the point he's trying to make.

I too believe that browser-based HTML/CSS/Flash/Silverlight platform is not the future. If some mad genius with a bunch of free time on his hands takes Cocoa, makes it truly cross-platform and merges it with something like Debian apt and manages to achieve Flash-like market penetration, that would be a killer platform to develop for: huge market (OSX/Windows/Linux + mobile devices that run them), native CPU speed, rich graphics, joy to develop for, seamless distribution - typing "apt-get install foo" is no harder than typing "http://foomaker.com/downloads/foo" plus your users won't have to deal with fucking login screens for everything and their shit keeps working on a plane.

I suspect the reason for web-app proliferation isn't technical, developing for the web just makes more business sense: you don't have to share your precious code because of those sweet GPLed tools you use, you cover Windows and OSX with one shot, you don't have to worry about folks pirating your software, and distribution/updates are much easier. Seriously, nobody needs a fucking web-based photoshop. What for? Collaborative red eye removal?
I'm sure he got a million applications so I can see the canned response but it was a bit over the top. Maybe it's just his way and it is only one instance. Plus, let's face it, he's in the driver's seat as far as this is concerned.
I agree. But unlike most New Yorker articles, I thought the last half was as interesting as the first.
[Google Tech Talks]: Faith, Evolution and (Functional) Programming Languages
Coming to an End (Poetically) Quicker
The ecoomics department is probably the best dpt that GMU has. I also went there, but I studied CS. I was a fairly decent student and I met other good students. If you would have stuck and taken the advanced CS classes like AI, Computer Vision, Compiler languages or Operative systems you might have gotten a glimpse of the hackers at GMU. I don't consider myself a hacker, but I do love coding. I never even dreamed of working for Booz Allen, but I don't see anything wrong with that idea either. There were some hackers there though, like the guy who coded and came up with Plasma Pong (it was later shutdown by Atari I think), and I think another guy who wrote RoadBlocks, the math department also had some really smart people. Apart from some Associate professors I think that the CS department has some really outstanding faculty like Sean Luke, Elizabeth White, Zoran Duric and I also heard professor Hamburger was awesome before he retired, I learned a lot from them (actually I never would have learned of hacker news if it wasn't for Professor Luke).
News About the News Business, in 140 Characters
Physicists Build 10 Atom Transistor
Could you name reasons why it was a costly mistake for you? Were there scaling problems or issues with maintaining existing code? I'm not trying to protect php, just curious.
You still can with DirecTv, Dish AND Bell Vu.
Hell, it's actually gotten a bit easier. You can do it all in software now (windows or linux, anyways), provided you have a DVB-S receiver for a PC. You can find them pretty cheaply on ebay.
Similar to a bit on Arrested Development:

http://www.hulu.com/watch/12317/arrested-development-family-...

Michael: No, no, no, no, pop. You're not doing another one of those Black Fridays, are you? The mass firings?

Narrator: Before firing his employees, George Sr. would be
sure to clear the office of its valuables.

[Employees loading a truck full of office equipment]

Ted: So when do we get to see our fancy new offices?

George Sr.: [closing the truck door] When you get your fancy new jobs. You're all fired.

Narrator: The employees never saw it coming, although their first task was to unload their equipment from a truck.
GM weeps: BYD F3DM Plug-in Goes On Sale in China, 3 years before Chevy Volt
I don't buy that. How is this going to increase googles revenue? How is it going to make facebook money?

Sounds like a lot of politics to me.
repaparaphrased: The theory was sound, reality just didn't agree with it.
Yeah, Seth should issue an apology for being so damn nice. What a jerk.
I have to second how well frameworks like CodeIgniter can help developers progress into cleaner code. Those modern tools discourage tightly coupled PHP code and they feel almost like an entirely different language. If you find that you can't stand PHP, you might want to take another look at these-- you'll find the code a refreshing difference from traditional "raw PHP" websites that people hack together early when they're learning.
The ticket-price-routing problem is not new, even if it is interesting. There was an article on HN a few months ago, IIRC, talking about how ITA uses tens of thousands of lines of Common Lisp, with hand-tuned assembly, to get their optimization queries to finish within their tight space (given the huge set of possible combinations) and time bounds.

My point was that the presentation's slides are very cursory in their treatment.
To make things more interesting, the book Black Romance paints Wareham as a pretty unsympathetic character. He pisses people off for seemingly no reason, he cheats on his wife after they had a baby, he lives the stereotypical rock 'n' roll lifestyle, with little to no apologies. However, as a fan of Galaxie 500 and Luna's music, this is nothing new. I've yet to hear anything genuinely positive about Wareham himself, other than the fact that his albums hold up surprisingly well.

The book makes for interesting reading. It is very funny at times, and is filled with some entertaining characters, even if it pushes all the wrong buttons for me on a deeper level. If you want an some idea of the book's content, [http://www.mensvogue.com/arts/music/articles/2008/02/facingt...] contains an autobiographical account of how his relationship with Britta Philips started.
What a confusing title and article. I read the first four paragraphs and I still don't really know what power has been unlocked, or how.
I like the humble part., surprisingly the best coders I have met are very humble. You should also mention to contribute to open source projects when they have some free time and to learn from their coding mistakes. Emphasize more the "Don't blow off your non-CS/ECE/EE classes!", this is an important point, not only because it can lower your grade, but I believe, because it makes a well rounded person. If you are well rounded, you will learn why it's not so good to be hacking away in front of a monitor for 30 hours straight (even though it's fun), and that your health, above all, is the most important thing. Also building up mental discipline is key, every project has some fun things and boring things; discipline will help them to get through the boring things so they can enjoy doing the fun things later on and finish the project, there is no point in starting something if you are not going to finish it. Just my 2 cents.
How Difficult is it to Write a Compiler?
Does PHP as a language have any qualities not found in other languages?

Yep.

1. Everything's a template. This is a double-edged sword.

2. mod_php is stupid simple. Makes deployment is a cinch.

I'll update this list if I think of others, but these two are a boon for new and impatient developers alike.
This is a fantastic example of exposition. I don't know anything about nanotechnology, but the author made it easy to follow the explanation.
didn't put it up at squidoo. if interested, I just posted it to http://www.jonesinsight.com/alt_mba.html.
I started programming when I was 12 and sadly my path to PHP looked something like this:

QBasic -> Visual Basic -> HTML/CSS -> PHP

With what I know now (various bits of Java, C, bash, Python, OOP, etc), I wish so much that my path to PHP looked more like this:

C -> Bash -> Java -> HTML/CSS -> PHP

Everyone who uses PHP professionally knows that it's extremely easy to write crappy PHP code. While PHP is easy for beginners to learn, it's equally as easy for them learn bad programming habits.

After 15 years, I'm finally putting in the time to learn the language I should have started with: C. I really wish it was the first language I learned because it would have made learning other languages so much easier (and learning those other languages would have made me a much better PHP programming when I started using it).

I believe every language has its uses and PHP is no different. While its a shame there is so much crappy PHP code out there, open-source projects like WordPress have shown it has its place. (If WordPress themes and plugins were not so easy for non-programmers to learn how to create and modify, I don't think WordPress would be where it is today.)
great info alex! best of luck with the interview. if appropriate, tell us how it goes.
How To Save Microsoft
I find Amazon affiliate links (especially text-based links) to be perhaps the least offensive form of advertising revenue on the web.
Yes, the same way two people bidding at auction on a famous painting is.
Be warned before you go there, Squidoo is the wikipedia of spam, advertising and self promotion.
Good advice for anyone following your career path exactly.
Couple things.

First, there isn't enough context in the LShift article to judge whether Marek has a valid point. He's conceded up front that both Libev and libevent show logN growth for adding new fd's to the loop, and seems to be arguing that it could be brought down to constant time. So? He hasn't presented evidence that the overhead he's talking about is significant in the real world. This is compute vs. I/O in an I/O-bound environment.

Next, he also seems to be taking his cues from the second set of benchmarks on the Libev page, in which every socket has a random timeout. This is a worst-case scenario for both Libev and libevent. Contrary to both the Libev page and Marek's analysis, setting timeouts on individual I/O events is not the only way to implement "idle timeouts" (which many protocols don't even have); it is in fact one of the poorer approaches.

Finally, he's taken two very specific benchmarks and generalized them to the whole design approach. Libevent is considered "high-performance" because async I/O is a high-performance design --- especially compared to demand-threading --- and libevent was the first stable, cross-platform implementation of it. It's also "high-performance" because it implements the high-performance kernel interfaces, like epoll. But the internals of libevent, while reasonable, are not (at least last time I checked) particularly optimized.

You can get around most of these problems by building on top of libevent; for instance, at Arbor Networks, we ditched libevent's (verbose, clumsy) timer interface for a better data structure, and simply kept libevent notified of the next closest timeout.

"Terrified" seems like a very silly word to use here, but I'm always eager to get schooled.
Well Seth's specialty is calling things they aren't or making up superfluous words when a simple English one just won't work for him.
Key quote: "While people typically think of programmers as coders, whose main talent lies in writing the arcane syntax of programming languages. I think that their main talent lies in their ability to analyze, troubleshoot, and solve problems. Code is just the physical manifestation that culminates the thought process of the programmer."
Also, very good user-annotated documentation (I don't know if this is still so, but it was when I started PHP) and a lot of existing code/libraries/applications (of varying quality) that you can use.

The value of PHP is not in the language itself, but in the fact it is easy to pick up and easy to deploy. This often causes people with strong coding background to dismiss PHP, but empirically it seems most people care a lot more about easy deployment than, say, closures or namespaces (or even consistent function naming).
So they are selling a book, cds dvds and t-shirts. The concerts only just cover their costs. What about piracy? They won't be able to sell that much music and movies, will they? When electronic books mature the same will probably happen to books too.

That leaves the t-shirts. The only remaining economic value of music is advertising hard-to-copy items? I guess we're going to hear a lot of songs about clothes.
You're (slightly) more likely to get a decent severance package. Statutory minimum here in the UK is #330/year of service, regardless of your salary. Most people consider 1 month's salary per year of service + 1 month in lieu of notice to be reasonable, but it's entirely at the company's discretion.
He described himself as a mediocre engineer (undergrad degree) in training whose life was changed when he went to Stanford Business School.
The NY office of one company I worked for just told people to report to meeting room A or B. The A crowd were told they kept their jobs (this round at least). The B crowd were escorted by security guards out of the fire escape and down onto the street.

The same company laid me off in London, the lucky ones (i.e. those of us who got it) took the rest of the company out for a drink to celebrate!
I can't agree with you more regarding self-discipline. My senior year in high school was the biggest joke: no one had to attend class, complete work, follow school rules, etc... but everyone got at least a C because teachers who cared about their students got their feelings twisted and wanted to make sure everyone graduated and the administration wanted more funding for higher graduation rates. Result: I completely slacked off and drank with my friends too much and lost all self discipline for my first year in college. I took all random classes, not even working to tick off GURs, and now I have to pick up my own pieces now that I have pulled my head together and figured out what I actually want to do with my life.
How do you pitch the idea to the company? Do you usually know someone there beforehand or do you do a "cold call (or email)"?
You can (and should) write unit tests for every new function, even as a single developer.

Here's an article you might find helpful: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/j-test.html

Also, wikipedia has a list of unit testing frameworks by language: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unit_testing_frameworks
Having tried to do the same thing (I didn't realize it had been done already until this morning), I AM quite impressed with the results. They do have varying degrees of success, but, in all, quite amazing.

Further, their scheme to work out the bugs is nice too. They are taking ratings, then if I were them, I'd look at the lowest rated, but still rated models for pictures on which their software does not work too well.
Yudkowsky And De Grey Discussion on Aging
Tell HN - Awesome Book : 'The Creative Habit, Learn it and user it for life'
Best comment from the comments on the 37signals site:

It’s ironic that this post is about all the ways a band can make money, but the trailer for the documentary focuses largely on the fact that Luna makes no money and barely breaks even on tours.
Ask HN: you're rich, now what?
This question is just for fun:

Let's say you sold your startup yesterday for enough cash that you never have to work or worry about money again.

What would you do now?
Time @ work != productivity, you know that.
A Look Back at Charles Ponzi the Schemer
Working with Erlang in Emacs
Write the world's most secure cryptographic library.
Scrum in under 10 minutes video
Everything going forward is under NDA, but if I get selected then I'll definitely get permission to at least post something here letting everyone know how it went.
The article reminds me of the ice storm of '98. I remember being without power (and, consequently, heat) for several days while the power company was working overtime to restore power across the state.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_ice_storm_of_199...
Eh? Isn't the sweet spot, like, every dev writing their own tests?!

I think writing tests makes you think a lot more about your code and how it will be used than just writing code ever will, obviously this is missing from the kind of software that Microsoft has historically produced...

I'm not a big fan of TATFT and/or purely agile methodologies, but, separating the dev/test roles just doesn't seem right anymore.