skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
With a passion? Kind of over the top don't you think? Snow is just a tool like php is just a tool. We're all programmers just trying to make development easier for ourselves and hopefully others. I don't know how anyone can hate any aspect of programming with a passion. It's our modus to find things we dislike and we write tools to prevent us from ever having to do them again.
I remember someone doing an experiment saving git branches every time he saved in his editor, which would give you some estimate into this:

http://www.jukie.net/bart/blog/save-everything-with-git-wip

But it doesn't look like he describes the result of this experiment.
The folks at cloud9 IDE or Codecademy are in a good position to collect and expose patterns in programming efficiency.

On one's own, simply using a VCS with a high enough commit frequency would let you infer something about lines added per hour. Perhaps an editor's undo stack could also be committed to store finer-grained metrics.

With detailed metrics and impressive data analysis there's the opportunity to uncover useful insights into how we debug and learn. That's probably more than a weekend project, but worth it in potential future payout IMO.
Your tone! You forgot to capitalize the letters of every sentence. You're contributing to the redditness!
Essay writing 
This kind of business involves going from one place to another like selling goods around the neighborhood, from office to office, and so forth. Some of the goods offered through this method are clothing and accessories, gadgets and even packed meals. By the end of the day, the seller will surely calculate for return on investment.
I think you are confusing the “meta-programming” and “run-time optimization” as described by the original article.

The JIT optimization you mentioned is actually his point 3, while I was addressing his point 2, “meta-programing” during compile-time. True, he mentioned in languages like Lisp where compile-time and runtime can be interleaved it would be a feasible solution, but he was focusing on statically-compiled features more in line with C++ templates, which I doubt would bring anything closer to what you were talking about.

C doesn't provide runtime profiling and optimization, but if performance is really critical, offline profiling to find hotspots and replacing them with pre-computed constants is a must. On average, the complexity and additional overhead brought by the JIT techniques probably won't offset the performance gain it buys compared to carefully profiled and optimized C.

PS. Why downvoting the grandparent comment?
That's my goal too, but often I find that the best way to write good short code is to write a shitty, longer version first.

"Write one to throw away" is the quote I remember reading from someone, and I find it applies well to some of the code I write (thankfully not all).
Yes I did. Even though I'm a big Linux guy, I bought a computer with Windows installed, learned C#, and was starting a legal software company when I got the paid internship. I decided to take the internship, because spending three months programming Ruby/Padrino/MongoDB with good programmers and learning from them would be very educational. I can always start my own startup later. eDiscovery is going to make someone tons of money.
Paypal had enormous problems with fraud that almost killed them (and did kill their competitors).

I think Bitcoin is awesome, but it offers users no protection - it's more of a cash replacement than a credit card replacement. This is something that might end up being difficult to handle (something to make sure users will understand).
Here's something constructive for all the haters. Snow is open source, seems with such a consensus it should be easy to get some people together and hack on a fork of snow that is more appealing to the masses. Or does the current PHP syntax leave nothing to be desired?
This is great news. Cars are dangerous, expensive, polluting machines. Roads and traffic create noise and destroy nice communities.

As a society, we should be trying to have as few of them as possible.
http://jacquesmattheij.com/The+Starter+the+Architect+the+Deb... seems relevant here. I often have the same problem - once the crazy technical stuff is done, I lose interest in the mundane details of packaging, finish, promotion... you know, the boring 90%.
Javascript libraries for dealing with touch events, multitouch and gestures
But from my POV (consumer), I get a 30 day float (assuming I pay my bills on time). Whats in it for me to not use a credit card?
Transferring bitcoin funds is already easy with the GUI. Sure a wrapper around it might make it slightly more user friendly but it's trivially easy to implement. Not to mention the fact that Bitcoin is illegal in most developed countries.
I hate conspiracy theories as much as the next guy, but there are a few basic principles I follow:

1) When people are making money off of something, they protect that method of making money, and evolve if necessary.

2) There are intricacies to our currency that might not seem immediately obvious. People depend on the discreet nature of physical currency - it controls the entire world of corruption (a lot of movies like to use diamonds as black market currency, but in reality its too difficult to rule out man-made diamonds these days, or to quickly evaluate the worth of a lot of diamonds). Corruption does not occur solely among gangsters, but all manner of people - from the most prolific bankers to the most "reputable" politicians. Digital currency can too easily be traced.

3) The government has made little effort to create its own digital currency, despite the fact that it would save tax payers billions, negating the need for the IRS, Mint, and reduce the need for the FBI and Secret Service (which monitors counterfeiting among other things)...and the corruption associated with physical currency. You might encounter more red tape and inertia than you anticipate -- if not now then when Visa lobbies its favorite candidate to create laws that work against you.

4) Third world countries are not a great target for digital currency IMHO, unless they have prevalent technology and understanding of it.
It's a relative thing -- wouldn't you agree that C is closer to assembly than it is to, e.g., lisp?
I just tried out Sublime Text 2. I can see the reason why its users like it.

As for me, it seems to take somewhat easy tasks and makes them more difficult. Installing packages was a head-scratcher at first, even with your guidance.

I'm just going to stick with Notepad++. It may not be pretty, but its straightforward and gets the job done.
I'm personally a PSPad user, performs fine, does what I need to do in windows

http://www.pspad.com/
If you know frequently used destinations (routes are familiar) like work, park, Aquarium etc why at all you need maps? Will be useful when going to a new place for which you don't know the route. In any case you need to type the location right. I am not getting the usefulness of this App. Am I missing some thing??
My anecdotal experience has been that short naps between reading works brilliantly in terms of retaining the concepts. I always used to take a nap after reading for about 40min - 1hr in my college days.
The author's assessment of debian is incorrect (I can't speak for ubuntu). Debian does not replace link /bin/sh to /bin/dash without being instructed by the user to do so. When dash was installed dpkg queries the user about what to do with /bin/sh. If you are unhappy with how you set your system up:

# dpkg-reconfigure -p low dash

Neat unix trivia article but don't blaspheme Debian...
This is wildly off-topic, but an idea caught my interest. I upvoted the parent of your comment to compensate for your downvote and it made me wonder how many other people have done the same. It put a bunch of thoughts in my head that I can't seem to form into coherent words, but those thoughts have to do with gaining quite a bit of comment karma from one person's accident, karma trolling, etc. I can't imagine that occurring on HN too any extent, but it's an interesting thought.
Ditto. There are many computers that are not under my exclusive use, so I can't put Sublime Text 2 on them in good faith. And they're invariably Windows machines. I can throw Notepad++ on them fairly harmlessly, and the utility it provides is awesome. In a plant environment, its search functions are darn near magic for parsing SCADA logs.
Interesting that you want to get rid of the support calls and e-mails. I'd hate to have to do that. I get so much useful feedback on what I'm doing wrong :-)
I know the OP and he's the "real deal." Hard-working, friendly, insightful, and smart. I'd definitely start a company with him if I hadn't already started one last year. So if you've been thinking about starting a startup but don't have a co-founder, shoot him an e-mail!
Mythical Man Month and Silver Bullet essay ought to be mandatory. K&R as well, and Stroustrup (both C++PL and Design and Evolution of C++).

Programmers don't stand on each others' shoulders, but each others' feet.
>how do you give an alternative currency real value?

I'd start by looking at how they implemented the Real in Brazil. They managed to convince an entire country to trust and use an, at the time, completely fictitious currency. There's an excellent article about it, which unfortunately I can't find.

The trick was to get people to start thinking of prices in terms of Reals, while continuing to use the original currency. If you can accomplish that, you've given your currency value.
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Good point! Ad subsidized Super Mario Bros.
Correct me if I'm wrong but doesn't this just boil down to writing a bitcoin client web app (and/or mobile app)? So you are betting the house on bitcoin becoming popular.
Ahh Notepad++. My editor of choice when I first got into programming. After switching to Mac years ago, I have been using TextMate/Xcode/Emacs.

There are only 3 things I look back on fondly from Windows: MSPaint, Winamp, and Notepad++.
This hit hard: The one sentence that will convince you to return/skip the iPad
"I know it's awesome, but the iPad is inherently device meant for consuming, not producing. By getting the iPad you'll spend more time consuming and less time producing."

This hit me hard. I met my friend over beers yesterday. Ever since he said this, it clicked, and I've been afraid to use the iPad. I'm considering returning it.

I thought back: Shit, he's right. While I've put some books & iTunesU videos, I've barely done anything useful with it.

What does YC think? Obviously this clicks more for YC folks than the average consumer.

Edit: Of course you can use it for useful things. I’m saying my personal usage so far has been anything but productive. Having the iPad on and NOT using it to browse the web/flipboard/etc is incredibly hard. Something even PG struggles with: www.paulgraham.com/distraction.html
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Thanks for sharing your story. I liked the part where you say "In fact, when my boss came into my office to fire me, I was installing python onto my work computer." That was funny, and yet at the same time reflects the difference between those who use idle time to learn something, or just drink coffee and chat. Good luck going forward!
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Yes but he's actually using bitcoin, not trying to come up with another digital currency.
You made the right call. Having that experience under your belt will serve you very well.

It's an interesting field in its own right, and is becoming increasingly competitive and sophisticated (full disclosure : I work in it).
Wow, those examples took me a while to go through and understand; it's amazing the level you can optimize a piece of code to hardware. I'm curious to benchmark the implementations and see the performance difference.

Maybe you or someone else knows the answer to this though: it seems like they are processing 4 bytes of the string at a time. If they read over (i.e. the NULL byte is in byte position 1 2 or 3), isn't that technically undefined behavior? They are only reading in the memory, but I feel like valgrind or another tool would spit out an error if that happened. It's aligned, so it won't trigger a page fault, but it seems like an unsafe optimization.
I have had the same experiences. After a given amount of hard studying (anywhere from an hour to a few hours), I find that I cannot maintain focus anymore. A short nap always fixes the problem, and when I come back to it things usually stick much better.
Are there any good tutorials that provide an implementation walkthrough of this kind of app?
he is back
Your value is highly variable depending on your location, skill set, communication skills and professional network and duration of the gig (contract vs. full time).

To quick and dirty it:

Low end: Check out Rentacoder.com.

Mid Range: $15-$23/hour contract or ~$40,000-$45,000/year salaried outside the valley or NYC, $65,000-$80,000 inside the valley or NYC.

Higher End: $24-$50/hour contract ($75-$100 on short term, specialized, mission critical gigs) or ~$45,000-$70,000/year salaried outside, $80,000 - $120,000 inside.

Guru++: A lot. Also, be sure you have a well stocked fridge of beers from many nations, a ping pong table and hipster art on your wall. :-)

I want to stress that the number of conditions that go into the pay number defy database columns. Ask for a number a little higher than you think and see what they say...
Questioning whether Chomsky was worth the teacher's praise demonstrated that you held the uncritical viewpoint, not her.
I would raise a small round of VC, hire a salesperson, a customer service rep, another couple devs to keep the build going, and go all-in. Definetly all-in.

Life is short, don't look back at this later as your biggest missed opportunity.
An excellent free and open source native Mac editor is Fraise, though I'm not sure if it is still maintained, but it still works great in Lion.

Another in development is Kod ( http://kodapp.com/ ) that I've not used much yet. My daily editor now though is Sublime Text 2 (free to try out).
There's an excellent article about it, which unfortunately I can't find.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2010/10/04/130329523/how-fake...

HN Discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1757716
Can you please share your ideas on this?
Whether you will use a service like this or not?
This is wonderful. I have been keeping a personal list from the books I have read. Using these can really help your business be user friendly and frame things in a way that users will see the most value in them. Great post... thanks!
Dragon book is something a compiler writer should read, but after he's gone through a compiler construction book first (I like Wirth's book; short and to the point). Definitely not an intro to compilation, it would scare me away.
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Startling article!

You would be eviscerated at every level if you tried to do this anywhere in the EU...

Not sure how this is possible, even in the US, since it should be a large risk to the carriers.
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Wow. That was the longest "do ONLY what you love, here's why" article ever.
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Seems like the fate of any popular news aggregator is to aggregate things of general interest, no matter how well-targeted it begins.
Without commenting on your first 3 points, I'd argue that a 3rd world country could potentially be an excellent place to gain mass adoption.

In the U.S. we have credit cards and fixed addresses to mail bills. There's probably a billion people who don't have this. There is absolutely an opportunity in 3rd world countries to leapfrog credit card systems, which for a variety of reasons don't work in these environments.

There's a mobile phone currency company in Kenya called MPesa which is currently processing 20% of the countries GDP! There's simply no way you could get that adoption in the U.S. that fast, since you'd have to displace VISA, Mastercard, and debit cards...no easy feat.

So OP is working on a hard problem, but its doable.
I had an idea to write Clojure parsers for the standard unix command line tools that translates the output into s-expressions.

I got too frustrated - on the one hand, Clojure's slow start up time meant it was no fun to use in a simple pipe

and on the other hand, even the simplist unix util has surprisingly complicated behavior. Like `wc` - it outputs three columns of numbers, right? Well, unless it knows filenames, which go in a fourth column. Or unless you pass it flags, which can turn any set of the number columns on and off. And then I thought, wait, what happens if you make a file which has leading whitespace in the name - it turns out it only outputs a single space in front of the filenames, so any whitespace after that is part of the name.

Which lead me to the conclusion: unix tools aren't actually simple - they are actually really complicated, but you can construct a happy-path of simplicity for most use cases

and functional languages are still monolithic when it comes to interacting with the outside world. Maybe someone will make a service I can run in the background that will run my command-line clojure scripts in a pre-warmed JVM, but that's not a piece of technology that I want to try to write.
believe its true in canada as well..... automatically signing anyone up for something they didnt agree to is generally outright fraud............
That's how I set it up for my wife's parents, since 2006 - a not very cheap laptop back then, still works fine (had to be Windows XP). Works good 6 years later.

Then my father, became computer geek late in his years, and I can't even stop his mouth when comes to applications :) - He's bigger kid than me in that respect...
I shuddered when I saw the word Access Database. (bad memories of porting those evil things). I don't care how much money is in those things, I will leave it to someone else :) Much like these guys are trying to do.
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Deadline of March 28, 2012 changed to March 29, 2012 now.

Don't delay on getting your ideas or non-ideas in!
It may be a throwaway because his employer doesn't yet know about this. I've had something I posted here (about maybe looking for a new job) come up at work. It actually led to a good conversation with my boss, but that isn't a preordained outcome.

Also, there's no possible way that amazon pays the same terms as normal customers, is there?
No love for Textpad on HN? Its been running strong for ages and has the "just works" feel about it - always. Install it, switch to windows keybindings and you're good to go. And, it has editable macros.

I live in the knowledge that I'm going to hell for not paying for that awesome piece of software!
This is actually pretty fascinating. People are making rooms for specific songs (like rickrolling), and people are generally trying to play the requested songs in each of the rooms :)
I agree that credit cards are going to be displaced, but what is the rationale that the solution requires its own currency? Most transactions are very much within national (or European) boundaries.

I think companies like Venmo, Dwolla and Square (or even PayPal) are well-positioned to becoming credit card alternatives.

So: why Bitcoin/a separate currency?
Yeah, I was worried till I actually talked to dev's right after reading the announcement on irc. In fact the last release of Kubuntu was all community, so these death of Kubuntu posts are just sensationalist news as per usual.
Same here, though I also miss WinSCP.
> it's because even solid coders produce spaghetti code with it.

That's ridiculous -- PHP is pretty analogous to most languages in terms of both capability and syntax. The biggest warts in PHP revolve around the standard library and that wouldn't prevent anyone from producing solid code.
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Well, I'm reading about the biases for quite a long time, but I have a question for you guys:

How do I really think better? In my experience, just knowing about the biases didn't helped me in becoming more rational and being able to think better. Any suggestion?
One of the best assembler IDE was Turbo Pascal 6.0. One would write begin/end, stick asm block in the middle and the rest will be in assembly. Full debugger support too, it was very convenient.
Thanks. Nobody has -ever- responded to me on HN. Now I know why.

Weird that a hackers forum has such little respect for those who wish to participate. Would have been nice to be notified, let alone given a reason.
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Consumption is not useless. Yes, the iPad is purely for consumption, but if that consumption improves you as a person/programmer/whatever, it is not useless. You state that "by getting the iPad, you'll spend more time consuming and less time producing", but I think that's a fallacy, if you remember that iPad time is consumption time, it can be very valuable. It is also important to remember that much of that time may be time that you never would have spent producing anyway (lying in bed, riding the bus, whatever). If you think your iPad is destroying your productivity, then sure, return it, but remember that the iPad is very good for consuming things, and in order to produce, you must consume. Don't discount the role consumption has in production (great artists steal and all that).
I mean, we are running Access in Wine in X11 on Linux in an isolated
user account on our server slice that revision controls your Access
database in git, and we're displaying it using VNC in your web browser
in flash.

If you asked me to describe the glue-code hackery project I would want to work on least in the whole world, I would have come up with something like that. There are probably uglier projects around, but I don't have the creative masochism to think of them.
Yeah, I see your point. Like you said, page alignment and size being a multiple of 4 won't cause a page fault, so it's technically "ok". I can only assume that at this level the corner is safely cut for the sake of performance.

Another more trivial example of something like this is in the repnz-based strlen() (slides 7-8), where %ecx is loaded with 0xffff ffff, which technically limits the routine to scan strings up to 4 gigabytes in length. It's a valid assumption that the string is under 4GB (especially on a strictly 32-bit system), but the point is that it's a semantically different routine than the C based one.

~vsergeev/frozeneskimo
>books & iTunesU

>useless

pick one
So any criticism of this is the "PHP community resisting change" -- that's rather convenient. I suspect many of the people criticizing both this language and the approach here aren't even PHP programmers.
This personal favorite from their About page lives on:

"By optimizing as many routines as possible without losing user friendliness, Notepad++ is trying to reduce the world carbon dioxide emissions. When using less CPU power, the PC can throttle down and reduce power consumption, resulting in a greener environment."

Gotta love such bold goals from a text editor :)
That we have become a consumer culture concerns me greatly.

That said, if people switch from consuming via TV which is entirely one-way, and switch to a consumption medium like the iPad that is two-way, that's a revolution.

The iPad is a revolution, and as entrepreneurs and developers, we should be aware of how it's changing the world around us.

But it's not a replacement for building, hacking, making and tinkering, but chances are, you aren't prone to forgetting that since you're reading this website.
I wrote my first novel on my iPad. Got a lit agent a few months later from it.

The consumption thing is bogus.