skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Struck a nerve, huh?

This was partially in jest (notice the lol), and I realize this is sometimes hard to convey in writing. Sorry.

But there's also a lot of truth in it, too.

No one is born a mediocre programmer. It's a choice.

Notice I didn't say a "junior" programmer. There's a difference. A junior programmer has less experience, but has a good attitude, is willing to learn, and practice his or her craft to get better. A mediocre programmer is just lazy and thinks he or she knows better.

This was directed at the thousands of lazy thoughtless programmers I've had to clean up after over the years. You know the ones. They refuse to follow accepted standards. They name their variables whatever they feel like at the moment. Good luck figuring out what "a" "aa" or "aaa" mean. Or locating them in a text editor. They use single entry, multiple exit. Good luck changing one line of code in the middle of that. They rewrite the same functions over and over, so I have to change all 14 versions. And spend the next 2 weeks regression testing.

I only wish these people were required to use a framework that forced them to conform to anything that would have made my life a little easier.

If "high and mighty" means "wants to get work done" or "cares about others", then thank you. Some of us choose to write clear, effective, easy to maintain code without a framework. If you ever have to maintain my code, perhaps you'll understand.
Is it possible to tell the difference between in-person presence and immersive telepresence?

Yes. I say this as a parent of a pioneer class student in Stanford's EPGY Online High School.

I'll acknowledge that the several examples I have seen (not just EPGY OHS) of distance learning courses have far from immersive telepresence, but I think there is evolutionary adaptation to real-world, in-person conversation that isn't taken advantage of by any distance learning communication mode I have seen.
If you're using Ubuntu, here's a handy shellscript to automate things.

I'm linking to the original. I also forked it to slightly tweak the behavior when creating the /usr/bin/ruby|gem|etc symlinks to play nicer with an installed ruby:

Original:
http://gist.github.com/37213

My fork:
http://gist.github.com/40302
From the article: "After all, most parents want their children to be far left in their early years"

It figures that the authors mentioned in the article are professors of American studies and English and not professors of economics or political science or history someone else who would understand what "far left" means.
The Apache XML-RPC framework is a complete joke. It is completely over-engineered with crazy patterns and stupid extensibility hooks that nobody is waiting for.

When Polar Rose still used XML-RPC we rolled our own framework that integrates well with Spring. You basically expose your POJO and be done with it ...

http://code.google.com/p/polarrose-spring-xmlrpc
That may be true, but it's a hell of a lot easier to make fugly spaghetti in something statically typed like Java (or C#, C++, and so on).

After 8 years of Java, I personally found it really refreshing to build stuff in Python and Ruby.
T9 on a standard numeric keypad is very fast once you've written a few thousand messages.
Fundamentally, you need to learn your craft. I have just inherited a large project based on Hibernate. I dislike it because there is all this crap between me and the database. I am proficient in SQL as well as Java and I don't like masking a very powerful language with a weaker Java-centric abstraction. If you are going to develop backends you need to understand databases and SQL. If you don't you will end up with an application that doesn't scale and is difficult to maintain.
I use Kohana myself, for exactly the reason that you mention you like Zend - it's a good starting point. And if I need to extend Kohana's model or rewrite it from the ground up, this is totally accepted and even encouraged by the framework.

I find it's just way, way easier to get up to speed with a framework as a base, and if your framework is any good, then it should be easy to shove aside later when you need to special-case things for performance or whatever.
"This is what caused the mortgage crisis: Spreadsheets instead of people were making decisions on loans."

That's an interesting perspective. It may be that a loan officer's nonquantitative intuition based on personal experience was a better basis for making loan decisions than running a formula on a spreadsheet.
I do not want to prove it, because I'm lazy, but I know it's trivially provable that it's possible to create a Turing machine in Excel in many ways. You could take any row or column to be the tape and store state and table in other cells. Then add a bunch of conditionals and LOOKUPs you get your Turing machine.
It would probably be easier using VBA, but it's an interesting idea. (Not that it would get you anywhere, though.)
Drop Classic J2EE and learn Spring. It will make things sooo much easier and manageable.
He also goes on to say:

I am discounting Rails here: I think Rails is great for what it is and I’ve had nothing but good experiences with it precisely because it is so “opinionated”. Its a very productive environment and manages to successfully avoid the runtime problems that I’ve personally hit in the past.

So... are you trying to make a point about Ruby or about Rails? Dare I give out the clichéd "Rails != Ruby" response here?
i find this more fun - http://dawdlr.tumblr.com/
In most offices, the AC is centrally controlled by the building management. Many office buildings also have windows that don't open.
Are you serious ? : -)
This is also a fun site: http://postsecret.blogspot.com/
The Rebirth of "Web TV"
Personally I've found when a decent framework is used, there's a lot less crap; since a lot of choices have already been made

ex. for web apps it prevents people from putting everything on one page (DB calls, logic, HTML, ...)
The large lecture hall is an example of something which was necessary due to past technology constraints but which persists even though it's no longer optimal. I've taught such classes of 75 to 80 students. Even at that modest size, there is considerable overhead just from managing that many people.

What we really need are uses of technology that maximize interaction between students and professors and amongst fellow students. The most productive time in terms of my teaching were the lab sessions of only 25 students each. That and office hours, which were attended by a shockingly small number of students. I suspect that study groups are also highly productive. Technology should be used to enable more interaction akin to study groups and office hours.
They gave me an interstitial (not sure that's the right word) about downloading Silverlight before they let me get to the main page. wtf?

scroll bars in drop down menus? wtf? seldo pointed out a couple things wrong, but pretty much everything is wrong.

unrelated: I was checking out the skydrive and checked the sys requirements. They don't even support their own operating systems.
"Windows Live programs do not support Windows XP Professional x64 Edition. Windows Live Family Safety does not support 64-bit editions of Windows."
The python tutor mailing list is quite good.

Alan Gault Tutorial and book are good
http://www.freenetpages.co.uk/hp/alan.gauld/tutcont.htm
here is the actual book:
http://www.amazon.com/Learn-Program-Using-Python-Self-Starte...

Dive into python is nice as well
http://diveintopython.org/

Best way to learn is install python, work through some examples, and then work on a project.

Holden's book is good for a web beginner
http://www.amazon.com/Python-Programming-Landmark-Steve-Hold...
speak for yourself - my sex life is a study in unity

...... I made myself sad =(
the affordable self-sufficient housing units make use of the tepee design. a tiny fire in the middle of a tepee keeps one cozy in winter (MA, USA) with most of the smoke going out the top. materials are pretty cheap, too (few thousand, depending on quality and versatility interested in; a strong storm can topple one if not done right)
This guy is not a stereotypical MBA type. If this guy has a college degree, I'd be shocked.
I thought this was going to be full of quirky insight into Bucky's life, and I was right!

This is a great article with some pretty sage advice. I'm definitely going to be buying the book referenced in the article.
Answer: It's far easier to talk to someone over a beer when you're in the same building as them. Or to pop up at their office unplanned with a question. Or to work on a project with team members.

School isn't all about lectures, and even for lectures, pre-recorded lectures don't let you ask questions.
The Birth of SQL
There are actually people who can't figure out the desired answers to those questions?
Depression has been shown to be one of the forces that teaches our brain. Basically, when we're depressed our brain is using the time to restructure itself so the next time an event occurs we're ready for it.

If my wife left me because I didn't pay enough attention to her then I'd get depressed, but the next time I'm married I'd be unlikely to make the same mistake because of the profound effect of depression. However, anti-depressants can hinder this learning process, so quite literally if I took anti-depressants after my wife (hypothetically) left me, it would be quite probable that I'd make the exact same mistake again.

Clinical depression, of course, is different as it's like the emotional equivalent of palpitations.

Personally I quite like depression, it's helped me a lot with my writing. It's odd as I seem to get a new perspective afterwards, I'd be interested to know if my depression is sometimes caused by my writing so I do learn a new perspective because I've been depressed at some pretty weird times before, but this is the kind of question that'll never be answered.
I would have preferred an EE...
Info from the legal side regarding Startups
Amen. I'll submit to a webcam if that's what it takes to keep people convinced I'm working, but I'd much rather have them say "he got his work done promptly and well, he's a-okay."
Well, he has definitely read it.

http://www.amazon.com/review/RYVTUPDAUANZW/ref=cm_cr_rdp_per...

Thanks for the link.
I use a framework because I'm aware of the fact that I'm an inexperienced coder. I could work out every little detail by hand, but for me it's much easier to have something basic in place that I can tweak to my heart's content.

So I guess I'm just an ambitious junior programmer? Which is to say, I want to get better, but I also want to make my project production-ready as quickly as possible, so I use a frame and fill it out.

So I think it's a mistake to say that frameworks are only useful for making bad workers produce work. Better to say that there's a time and place for everything, and that while frameworks are overused, they're useful for certain people doing certain tasks.
Numenta: HTM computing
30 second productivity hint that has saved me days
Unfortunately for the original article, the JSR-168 Portal standard is one of the worst things ever created that became horrifically popular for some mysterious reason.
Not currently. We are mainly focusing on more Infrastructure-as-a-Service offerings where Microsoft's offering is more of a platform that you can develop for.

However we are planning to support Rackspace's Cloud Servers once they become available.
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_a7jkcMVp5Vg/SWglolDXivI/AAAAAAAAHt...

I wish there was a way to follow this person, because I think she is going to really turn out to be something special.
On the way back from a summer in Alaska, I met a couple that was squatting on some land in northern British Columbia -- so far north that the fastest way to get there was through the Yukon. The woman spent their first winter there in a teepee and had their first child in it. The man descirbed the subsequent events as: Then she picked me up by the shirt and said, "YOU WILL BUILD ME A CABIN!"

That was a really nice looking cabin!

(The town was Atlin, for those of you who want to look it up.)
Shafer’s this-ain’t-the-Web dream world
I find myself drifting away from work when it gets a bit boring or too challenging. At a startup, this is NOT COOL.

(especially when it's a startup you own).

I installed BlockSite a few months ago, typed in the URLs of 10 or so places I waste time during the day, and then typed in a random string of characters as my password.

I copy-and-pasted the password to a text file, so that I can use it again to add more sites to the block list.

Are there a thousand ways to get around this?

Heck, yes.

But those ways force me to actually confront whether I WANT to get around SiteBlock, and the answer is always "no".

This tool gets around the fact that my fingers seem to type "Boing Boing" on their own, without my volition...
Google widened lead in search in December
"Struck a nerve, huh?"

Yes. I am not a great programmer. I only started caring about it a couple of years ago and since I don't have a real education in it I am very behind in many areas. I am trying to get better, but it's not easy.

"No one is born a mediocre programmer. It's a choice."

I don't know if I agree with this. Some people are born with incredible talent in various areas. Some people are just born musicians, others athletes, others programmers. There is no substitute for hard work, but some people will never be able to grasp what others can do. No matter how long you play guitar, you're not going to be Jimi Hendrix.

I understand your sentiment, I really do. But I would be careful of calling misinformed people lazy. I would bet good money that there are "standards" I am breaking with my code that I don't even know exist. If the books I read or the sites I visit haven't told me about them, I wouldn't call myself lazy.

In the end, HN is a community of amazingly talented people who are, to me, beyond brilliant. I think it's easy to lose sight of the "real world" some times when there are so many smart people in one room. Just have a little bit more slack for people who are trying and not as good as you. I think you will find it explains a lot.

"Some of us choose to write clear, effective, easy to maintain code without a framework. If you ever have to maintain my code, perhaps you'll understand."

Do you "choose" to do that, or are you benefiting from the years of education and experience you have? It's not like I can wake up tomorrow and choose to be an expert programmer. I can only try to keep learning(which is why I hang around here). I completely understand your frustrations with work, it can be a pain in the ass to deal with people who make your work harder through their incompetence, but I don't think it's as deliberate as you are suggesting it is.
http://github.com/sproutward/kraplan/tree/master

"The Kraplan project grew out of parodies of some awful Kaplan advertisements in the Boston subway. Kraplan is a project to use humor and invective to get people thinking about standardized testing. "

if you want to get involved let us know.
It definitely does make the above more manageable, but it doesn't solve the core problem which is that the whole design pattern is built for complete configurability, but without sensible defaults. In some sense, Spring only exists to manage the massive configurability of Java design patterns, but by adding it's own configurations to the mix. It's definitely a cool idea, but the better solution is to just avoid factory/context patterns. It's solving a problem most of us don't have.
Wow! That is really amazing.
How big is the javascript file you use to run that?
I would be concerned with slowing down a user more on an already javascript heavy site.

However, what I found really amazing was that in the playback you are able to show javascript modals, so i assume that also means that all ajax responses will be captured by userfly.

Really cool.

I assume you see this being used more in user testing than in capturing the daily usage of a site? I would think that capturing daily usage would be be too time consuming for anybody to actual go through all the videos.

As far as the look of your site, I do find the yellow on white a bit hard to read, and it doesn't stick out much.
Unfortunately, JSR-168 compliant portlets are perhaps the crowning example of horrible implementations of an insane standard.
most of us have trouble with "all" and "never" qualifications. it's one thing to be reasonable, not make excuses, and do one's best, but when one starts thinking deeply about various scenarios, then the "right" answer seems like an overly simplistic lie.
The thing which amazes me about the PostSecret site is how artistic/visually impressive some of the PostSecrets are. Maybe passion breeds expression
Not a single mention of "tipjoy.com"?! That strikes me as a missed opportunity; the main place this is going to get shared is on twitter…which is obviously your market, full stop, for Tipjoy. If only a single person learnt about Tipjoy from visiting the page, it'd be worth a single small link in my opinion!
I was hoping the "monad tutorial fallacy" would be something related to assuming people cared about monad tutorials. Oh well - I will eagerly await that article ;-)
From the article: "After all, most parents want their children to be far left in their early years — to share toys, to eschew the torture of siblings, to leave a clean environment behind them, to refrain from causing the extinction of the dog, to rise above coveting and hoarding, and to view the blandishments of corporate America through a lens of harsh skepticism."

I'm not really sure how any of these are even left wing values, let alone far left.

My best guess: the authors of the book are part of the far left (most academics are, particularly outside the sciences) and believe that conservatives are evil racist sociopaths. Therefore, anything teaching children how to play well with others is left wing.
This is terrible news. If I was Amazon I'd eliminate all NY affiliates and tell them to contact their state. Lack of regulation and taxes is what makes the internet so awesome (and sometimes, awful).
It is completely positive and OK to be depressed when someone dies or angry when you've been hurt

Granted, but it is detrimental to be feeling "negative" emotions frequently for no significant reason. Seligman's research in particular suggests that a person's outlook can be changed through specific mental exercises and that these changes have real-world effects, including improvements in health, career success, and how the person is perceived.
Spring is definitely an improvement, however we had a serious problem getting it up and running in our environment (it was a while ago so I can't remember what it was exactly) and had to give up on it.

It really does not help that all of our web projects are struts 1 and we have still have a fair amount of torque projects hanging around.
Ask HN: Best Micro Payment provider?
HN crew -

What is your advice for the best provider to accept micropayments? Ideally the economics work for products that are $0.99 - but anywhere from $0.99 - $9.99 would be ideal.

Obviously the transaction charge is what makes the small prices so difficult... any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!
One Space or Two?  When did this change?
We offer unlimited sick time, I think that makes a big difference. I don't know if I buy this though, isn't isolation a problem too? I like a mixed space, private areas for people, but with many open collaboration areas. Give people laptops and they can run around.

Tiny cubes are the worst of both worlds. Can't have a private phone call. Can't pair program or work with others.
No, that mistake typically is a result of somebody faulting Ruby for Rails' problems. As the parent to my comment said,

Rails: Here's a kick-ass hammer, a kick-ass saw, a kick-ass measure tape, etc...

My point is that those kick-ass tools may be made of balsa. The editorial that I linked immediately came to mind because it too used tools as an analogy.
Isn't the fact that a company treats theirname.com as outsourceable a great indicator that they don't get the web?
The test succeeds in its purpose: weeding out those who cannot figure out how to deal with the immense amount of bullshit inherent to any retail position. If someone isn't savvy enough to tell their employer stealing is wrong, they probably aren't savvy enough to tell the customers the dress makes them look skinny.
The nice thing about buildings is that they last. Software is not like that. A framework for a programming problem may not be valuable in 20 years, or even 5 years later.
Has anyone studied the environments that great products were produced in (eg, Xerox Parc, Apple)?
This article is all over the news but I can't get a copy of the original paper.
I think the two-space-at-the-end habit was a typewriter thing. It's now about as obsolete as typewriters.
Lemme guess. Next you tell me you're gonna make it possible for me to send payment to others via the mail, right?
The taxman cometh? IRS urged to tax virtual worlds, economies
Not our kind of hacking.
I know Joel has read it, Joel is one of the biggest blogging proponents of a lot of their philosophy. I only meant to be a bit tongue-in-cheek. I don't think Joel is trying to rip those guys off at all.
Top 80 Best Web Hosting Providers With Comparison Chart
Divorce probably isn't the best example to support your point:

Fifty percent of first marriages, 67 percent of second and 74 percent of third marriages end in divorce, according to Jennifer Baker of the Forest Institute of Professional Psychology in Springfield, Missouri.

http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=363986

I tend to see a stronger distinction between pain and depression.
The Case Of The Missing Burrito
The idea that using well tested, widely spread open source software is somehow less reliable than writing your own is the kind of baseless FUD I wouldn't expect from you, axod.

Next, you'll be suggesting that people write their own web server instead of using Apache? Or perhaps they can trust other people's code so long as they pay for it, so you'll send them towards IIS?

Come on, now.
Given that emacs has a command 'forward-sentence, which depends on this, I really really like two spaces at the end of a sentence.
That's what Overstock.com did.

http://www.realtechnews.com/posts/6289

To get around the “Amazon Tax,” Overstock.com terminated its relationship with any New York affliates; it also filed suit against the state of New York (as did Amazon.com, separately). Meanwhile, Newegg.com simply stopped collecting it.
http://rubyonrails.com/applications says you're wrong.
Can someone please explain to these people that the "center" of American politics is nowhere close to the center of political thought of the world as a whole?

Once you understand that, the whole argument falls apart.
Benefits of programming (doing) versus reading blogs (thinking?)
Maybe? No It definitely does. That's why music is always better when times are tough for the artist.
Writing Decisions: Headline tests on the Highrise signup page
Who doesn't want a great big, GPS enabled, "FEED ME" button?
Eight ways Windows 7 could flop
The photography is so-so, but there is usually always one picture of a dish. Technique, historically, was demonstrated in illustrations but they have moved to video in recent years.

Visual depiction is not their strong suit. Their strength is overwhelmingly in recipes and analysis. You are buying their scientific approach to recipes and expert analysis of tools and dishes.
PyGame is a binding to SDL. "Simple DirectMedia Layer is a cross-platform multimedia library designed to provide low level access to audio, keyboard, mouse, joystick, 3D hardware via OpenGL, and 2D video framebuffer."

May I suggest that going to the bare metal (yes, programming languages are a kind of framework, too) for implementing Tetris is a bit over the top?
I wonder how many sheets of paper it would save annually. I also wonder if we should gzip books before they're printed.