skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Real programmers don't test their code, QA does that for me, it comes back as defects later
more like TNW is just especially useless. of course oink was a bid to gather data, that's what all the rate-things apps are. except oink failed, nobody used it. if it was successful at gathering data, it would still be running.
Great post. A point I want to emphasize is that learning py2.7 is learning Python 3, if you are careful to pay attention to the recommended/pythonic way of doing things.

For the most part Python 3 removes syntax and functionality that was long-since depreciated or at least strongly advised against.
Precisely! But it is how it could become a replacement, eventually. The hardware is becoming increasingly capable.
Syria to Twitter — ‘Let Our Topics Trend’
Since you guys are in the same space. What are you seeing that the rest of us are missing? Is there an actual business around the idea?

Oink was maybe useful when items were attached to locations. As soon as people started like Macbook Pros and other free standing stuff, it became completely pointless for me. (Too cluttered and not enough recommendation value.)
do you count Digg as a success?
Milk always made it pretty clear that anything that didn't gain traction would get killed. They are going to launch 2-3 products a year and kill anything that doesn't get good uptake.
i wonder if YC would ever consider funding startups without a clear idea
I think one of the biggest hurdles to ranking and rating systems is how the data comes in. Imagine a two-dimensional histogram where Y is the number of ratings and all of the items are arranged on the X axis.

What I saw with Oink was this X axis (the number of items to be rated) growing faster than the Y axis (the number of ratings): in effect, noise growing faster than signal.

They weren't aggressive enough in filtering out duplicate entries and/or working with businesses to upload their catalogs onto Oink so users didn't have to add (and re-add) them. Not saying it was an easy task, but essentially this is the main challenge to such a product.
I think the article is using wrong examples if they talk about web companies such as Facebook, Google or Twitter.

The GPL doesn't force you to free code you don't distribute, for example the code behind your server. This means that, if Facebook did use a GPLed library to, say, show you advertisemnts based on your 'likes', they wouldn't have to GPL their modifications (if any) or the part of proprietary software that used that specific library, let alone their whole infrastructure.

So this argument simply doesn't apply to this kind of software.

A license that forces you to release your modifications even if you don't distribute your software (again, a web application for example) is the Afero GPL, that is just another beast.

TL;DR If you don't distribute or sell software, the GPL is not a concern.
No offense, but why are you interested in seeing what they build next? Seems to me they are nothing more than a small group of overfunded kids with computers.
Random aside: the article says "just over three months." Then links to an article from November 3, 2011. Can nobody in this industry do basic arithmetic? I realize that four months is just over three months, but argggh.
yeah without cscope it would be impossible to follow huge code bases. though i am not sure how good is cscope at generating symbol database for non-c languages.

ideally, it would be really nice if cscope/xcscope provided some means of creating (and saving) bunch of call-stacks, which you can navigate in forwards/reverse direction (not sure if i am making much sense here...)
Please don't fix this with a technical solution.

I can't agree more with wpietri above. There surely is a non-technical problem at play. That isn't to say that you shouldn't try to automate your babysitting, but if your need for babysitting is that severe, you have other problems.
Anonymous-OS 0.1 : Anonymous Hackers released their own Operating System
These days, most folks posting here have a backup regime for their PCs.
"People talk about pivoting all the time now, but if something isn’t working after four months, we’ll just shoot it in the head and start again" - Kevin Rose, last April http://techcrunch.com/2011/04/04/milk-kevin-roses-new-compan...

In fact, I think it shows a lot of discipline to stick to what they said they'd do.
This is a good example of how extremely hungry entrepreneurs often have the advantage. Established companies and serial entrepreneurs rarely stick with their ideas if there isn't immediate success. Yet most large successes take time to mature and build momentum. Really sad to see kevin and milk give up so fast.
I'm still getting upmodded for this but 'raganwald graciously fixed my concern with the article; if I could edit the comment, I would. 'raganwald is a stand-up guy.
> Facebook is winning advertising because they have 750 Million users.

That's a rather bold claim. How many of those users see, much less click on those ads? I know for all my family (of which roughly half use FB), no one sees ads because I've disabled them. How many of those 750M are active accounts that represent real people?

Fact is, we don't know and it's their revenue that shows us... and they're far far behind Google in that respect.
Chrome shows off recent additions: web components, remote android debug, & more
You are mixing up automated Unit Testing with TDD. They overlap a lot but they are not the same.

There are people who could write quality software with good test coverage without following TDD style.
I really wish automated testing was significantly better for Java and the ilk. To steal from the Haskell world, I want to augment JUnit/TestNG with Small and QuickCheck.

The tests would go something like this:
1: SmallCheck exhaustively tests the small cases
2: JUnit/TestNG tests the main use-cases.
3: QuickCheck produces a lot of random tests and hammers the APIs.

Sadly (for Java at least) this appears to be a rather difficult ask.
Well I ran Firefox 3.6 for years and it was stable as a rock. Couple of months ago, Ubuntu pushed the latest Firefox in updates. I am now running 10.0.2 on lucid and it barely lasts for couple of hours before crashing when running Gmail. I have dutifully submitted all crash reports and hope that somewhere on the 2012 roadmap, they also take care of this.
> I hope we can wipe poverty off the earth soon.

Define poverty.

If you define it as having much less money than everyone else around you then it's impossible to ever get rid of it. Someone will always have less money. Someone will always have fewer skill and have the poorer jobs.

However, if you define poverty as not having the basics, then we are well on the way to getting rid of it already.

Another few doublings of our energy usage should do it. (Energy usage = resources available, which means everyone has those resources.)
If they didn't really believe in this "innovative" idea of taking pictures of food and posting them on the internet, and didn't have the resources and conviction to see it through, then why will they be more successful next time?
I used to work for Lehman Brothers; since then I've worked for Amazon and Google in product capacities. (I was a PM before I went to MBA and then LB.)

The biggest problem was that there's little incentive in financial products to pursue true creativity or innovation that generates value for your clients. Both the market and the regulatory climate make it very hard, and very risky, to develop and market new products. It's a lot easier to just find innovative ways to strip value from your clients, or make new securities look a lot like old securities.

My role at Lehman involved helping issuers structure securities for various capital markets. I did not see us openly fleecing clients in the style of Enron or this Goldman article, but it was pretty clear that some kinds of deals were far more profitable for the firm than others, and it was going to be in your interest to promote those kinds of transaction. It's the people at the top who set the incentives and set the culture of a firm, and things will only generally get worse as they trickle down the structure to individual teams who are more interested in their personal comp than the overall corporate brand.

One of the main reasons I wanted to go back to tech from finance was that I felt like there's at least a lot of tech companies (Amazon and Google included) where delivering true value to the end user is the primary value, and how you get promoted and paid. I did not feel that was the case on Wall Street; it was more important how many fees your team brought in than whether the issuers (clients) were still in business a year later.
Titleist 712
Joke is the music pirate club Oink was shutdown.
It is true the OECD countries are currently bending the developing world over backwards. But this does not mean that the OECD needs that kind of advantage. We might not be as rich without it, but we would still be quite rich.

Also there's very little military projection from the Scandinavian countries for example.

And I am not sure how the overseas friend helps? If you look at median (not average) GDP per capita, the US is actually less wealthy than many European countries. Plus, in terms of trade with Europe, the US is as much a competitor and exporter as it is an importer.

So I'd say Western European or Scandinavian style prosperity is definitely possible without UK style ex-colonialism, or US style inequality and military projectionism.
I do, I just think Kevin Rose get's tired of things pretty fast
Don't troll on HN. My comment is the exact opposite of paranoia. Wesley's post papers over their strategic goals with technical jargon. That's not paranoia. That's the standard operating procedure for Google. They are an ad company. http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jw_on_tech/archive/2012/03/13/why-i-...
Personally, I think you kids are too young and inexperienced. You say you have experience, you say you can "do" things. Prove it. Make something ship it, market it, charge for it. Whatever it is, just do it. There is no substitute for proof.

I'd even advocate for you to work for a start-up as an early employee. That way you can watch, learn and observe and pick up some experience because there's a lot to learn.

The key to being successful, let alone a successful single founder is having a solid understanding of who you are, what you are or aren't capable of, how you see the world, and how you want to make an impact. Some people call it mettle. You might think that you have it all down, unless it's been tested, you just don't know and you'll be always be second guessing yourself. I just don't think you get that unless you've fully entered the "real life".

This all goes back to my first point. If you had belief, you would already be doing it instead of searching for validation here. It sounds harsh but I understand your angst. Trust me it becomes managable with time.
Glad they are moving on. IMHO never understood what problem OINK was solving or why so many people ran to support it simply because Kevin Rose was attached. I have the utmost respect for Kevin but oink was very "emperor's new clothes" for me. I wondered what everyone was looking at while I saw nothing but junk
Well, it did have a whole IE support paragraph... so it is about IE8 somewhat. I have been looking at basecamp over the last few days too. So for me, this was the most relevant part of the article. Unfortunately some customers still use IE8 (and even 7), so it would be silly of me to force a tool on them they can't use.

Back onto the main topic...

In my experience IE8 is the most important one to profile and speed up - since it is quite slower than other modern browsers. Spending time in the IE developer tools profiling can give some pretty good gains.

Moving expensive code into click handlers can have the drawback of making the user Touch Points, or where the user is doing interactivity slower. This is where users can often notice the slow down. But I'm guessing you managed to make it take less time than 200ms, and it's probably a little touched item anyway, so probably still worth it. The alternative is to spread the computation after load, so the user might not even notice it happen. Or if you're modifying the DOM, why not just do it before you send it to the user - and send them html which doesn't need a lot of javascript manipulation done.

It also brings up the point of testing and profiling. I noticed there was a bug report in your blog comments. It's really helpful to have tests before you start doing profiling, and especially once you have made your changes. Tools like speed.pypy.org are really nice for tracking performance regressions too. So, when a developer adds some new JS functionality into your app in 4 weeks time, you can see when the performance regression was added.

cya
Working programmers should be incredibly thankful to Mr. Stallman for pied-piping thousands of people out of workforce and for keeping the cost of hiring a good software engineer high.
Guide to YC now available as a free download on Hyperink
you gotta look at the conversion rate as well. If only 500 ppl used Pinterest years back, but 200+ people continued using it daily after 1 month, that's shows the product has very good potential, even though the total # of users is weak. That means you just gotta figure out to get more traction.

If on the other hand, you find out only 1 person is still using it after a month, that means it's a product fit problem, and sticking to your guns is probably futile.
Favorite Domain Registrars Among Startups: An Analysis
Milk. The whole point of Milk is to pump out lots of ideas (and hope one sticks). It would be against their mission statement to keep Oinking.
How do you feel about regression testing? Maybe instead of "writing" tests for potential bugs, you write tests for bugs you've found already.
Yoda sez: "Ideas make not a good business person Ideas make an idea person"
Study Confirms Government Produces the Buggiest Code
"- Most bugs/edge cases I encounter in our production apps are things I'd never think to write a test for ..."

I feel that way often too but I write test more as a specification for how I want the code to work then as a catch all bugs thing.

"- I deal with custom domains, authentication, and 3rd party API calls in almost every app we have. IMO, this adds 20% or more to the (already high) testing overhead just to get these things configured right in the test suite
- More code is moving to front-end Javascript stuff ... so, now I have to write Rails tests AND JS tests? Sounds delightful"

I feel your pain, I code stuff that use WebGL currently and I find it hard to test that stuff.
Same here. On my Ubuntu, I am consistently switching back to Firefox as Chrome is having some serious issues, particularly dealing with Flash. I kill one or two tabs per session everyday. The only software that drives me more crazy on Linux is Spotify.
Enhanced Protected Mode
The anorexic startup
Called this one a few months ago https://twitter.com/#!/zinssmeister/status/15514462538288332...

But actually I am still surprised how quick this got axed. As a user you gotta ask yourself these days if it's worth investing a lot of time and content into a new app. An App that might be shut down, just because the builders want to go try out a new idea.
To give Kevin Rose some credit here, he always state up front that Milk was going to "try" different ideas and move on to another if one wasn't bringing the right amount of traction.
Now I hoped that the transition over to a new idea wouldn't mean the instand death of the previous and that's probably the biggest surprise here.
Does an ER surgeon always have the time/bandwidth to scrub hands before surgery?

Does it potentially take the surgeon several days to scrub before an emergency surgery?

Edited to add: I appreciate the analogy, but it's flawed. If someone comes to me and says "here, developer A is on holiday, and we have this bug that it causing massive disruption in the field," is it appropriate for me to say "well, I can do that, but it will likely take me five days so I can understand the codebase and write the appropriate unit test suite."

This is circumstance I thinking about, not necessarily inheriting a codebase and having to add features to it. In that case, certainly, I'm going to take my time, read the code, and write tests.
Is someone running a negative PR campaign against Pinterest? Or is this really all an organic result of the uncriticalthinking media echo chamber?
If Richard really cared about FSF he would stop making such a spectacle of himself as it's easy to discredit a movement with a gibbering lunatic as its frontman.

Then again, maybe he's setting an example of how programmers should make money in a post-FSF world (writing books and doing interviews)
In the grand scheme of things none of this will really matter. Silicon Valley and tech in general is in the grips of ADD culture.

It's no longer about million dollar ideas, it's not really about execution of solutions either, it's about teams wandering around in search of something.

And maybe inevitably Kevin Rose will stumble upon the real purpose of Milk and spend time on it and make it a success. And the mistakes he made will just be papered over while what worked is left to be studied.

That's the real point anyway.
The real tragedy is that few people understand the value of an ideologue.
But what's the alternative?

Assume that Posterous was charging for their services with a monthly fee. Is this any guarantee that they wouldn't take the same offer to sell? Or would you just be out your monthly fees and still have to move?

The more money they have coming in, the more desirable an acquisition they become. In theory, they might have less pressure to sell if they have cash flow, but it's not clear this is enough to counteract their increased appeal to an acquirer. Rather than indicting "free" services, it would seem more rational to avoid "cloud" services whether paid or unpaid.

Perhap you should choose only services from companies you feel are too large to be acquired (Google) or companies whose code is available to run on your own if they were to close down (Github). Or stick with self-hosted solutions with that plan that you can change hosts as necessary.

For any company you chose, I think you have to presume that while they will try to keep their service running, they will be doing so primarily out of self-interest. The more you can align your interests with theirs, the better the chance that the service will continue and you won't have to move.
Painless instrumentation of Celery tasks using statsd and graphite
I find M-x rgrep extremely useful as well.
Yes, this is normal. Most movies that are shot on film, use this film. 2k is slightly low though, 4k is better, but 2k is not unusual. (1080p is 2k.)

However the industry is transitioning to shooting entirely in digital (in 4k if they can afford it, in 2k if not), so there is no 35mm film. Also 24 fps is starting to be considered poor quality.

Side note: 4k is 8 times the resolution of 2k.

Edit: Sorry, meant 4 times.
The coming iPad storage crunch thanks to Retina display apps
The 'Ivy League' is an athletic conference which includes Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, Pennsylvania, Princeton, and Yale. While it tends to be associated with top-tier universities, it definitely does NOT include Stanford or Cal Berkeley (both Pac-12), or MIT.
In a 300 years at a 2% growth rate, the world will be 400 times richer. Long term carbon sequestration will be a trivial cost, or will be unnecessary.
Ask HN: Where to transfer a .it domain?
I am purchasing a .it domain from a 3rd party vir a broker. Normally I would transfer it to my Godaddy account, but apparently Godaddy does not support transfer of .it domains. I would leave it with the current registrar for simplicity, but they are a bit difficult to deal with.

My question is, can someone suggest a good registrar to whom I can transfer a .it domain? I have heard good things about Gandi, would anyone recommend that?
I interviewed for a developer position with Kevin and he told me that Oink was an experiment long before it launched. I didn't take the job because I personally would rather work towards long term shipping products. He's also clearly more of a product guy than he is a tech guy, so that makes sense. He's got a bunch of money to last him many years to try different things. If it doesn't stick or go big, he's now got code, developers and data to move onto the next project. No big deal, I'm actually a bit jealous of that position as it sounds like a lot of fun to be in his shoes. My prediction (without any basis) is that we should expect to see another announcement from him about some new experiment in the near future. =)
Yes I'm pretty sure most films are edited digitally. Editing software can automate the process of actually splicing the film to sync the digital edits, assuming the film wasn't completely shot digitally either (which is getting popular as well).
Seconds Is Pointing To The Larger Vision Of Payment Identity
I wasn't a fan of Oink from the beginning. On its first use I was able to like such arbitrary things like my own T-shirt, or a piece of gum on the floor. I knew right then this was going to get way too noisy and it did.

I do see where they're coming from though. The reputation system was supposed to balance this out. Kind of like social news websites where people submit tons of links. Somehow through upvoting things become relevant no longer noisy and I'm pretty sure that's what Oink was going for. It was all very well designed.

I think a lot of people who used it didn't treat it that way. They treated it as another review site, which it also was. But treating it that way makes it such a chore to "build" and so eventually we all lost the point of it all.
tl;dr - Man went in trying to interview Stallman with a bunch of preconceptions ("here's what I expected to happen:"), ignored what Stallman was trying to say, and is now writing an article about how not understanding someone confirmed the prejudices and stereotypes he had about them.

Lunduke is obnoxious, Stallman is a jerk, and it doesn't surprise me that most programmers continue to think they are entitled to earn a living from programming while being the first to shout about the "buggy whip makers" cliche whenever a discussion about jobs and automation comes up.
I want to like Rust because it's mentioned everytime Go is, but the syntax is just so disgusting. I know that seems petty and is a personal opinion, but part of the joy of Go is that anyone can grok it immediately. I've had three projects now on GitHub that I've built for classmates. Several of them have told me that they were able to read the source very easily (after an explanation of `go` for goroutines). I don't find that to be the case with Rust, even for relatively small examples.

As for D, I simply need to give it another go, pardon the choice of words.
Google Releases the New Candy-Cane +1 Buttons -- WTF?
My reference pronunciation has always been like the word "watt", deadpan, with a blank face while staring into space.
Tell pg: arc bug in long threads
I've noticed that in long threads(~40+ comments), replying will sometimes take me to the user comments page of of a semi-random HN user - never the author of the thread or of the comment to which I reply, but always a participant in the thread. An example might make this clearer...

In this long thread about prison policy: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3691372

I comment to this post by tptacek:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3694836

Hitting 'reply' posts, but then takes me to Moldbug's comment page: http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=moldbug

...and Moldbug did have 11 comments in that thread, with this being in closest proximity: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3692432
I'm glad that Richard Stallman and his uncompromising position exist.

I'm also glad that his is not the only voice in the open source/free software community.
Seriously. And I expected better than a "think of the children" stance from the interviewer.