skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Input speed is totally a major part of being a productive programmer. Not necessarily raw words-per-minute typing (it helps, but how much of programming is words, compared to symbols?) But navigation speed around your machine and environment makes a huge difference. Things like cutting a block of code and jumping down two screens to paste it. Or memorizing all the keyboard shortcuts for your debugger, so your mind stays on the problem rather than nosing around toolbar buttons. Or operations as mundane as fixing the indenting of a block of code, that a programmer could easily do a hundred times in a day. Save five seconds on that and it seriously adds up.

I naturally zip around (Windows) environments very fast. I can typically compile and alt-tab over to the output directory and copy and paste to a deployment folder in under two seconds, often before the programmer watching next to me registers that I've done it. This seriously matters! Like you say, programmers with this practiced skill set can code quicker and debug quicker and ship quicker. (There are downsides; I can't stand pairing with a slower typist, drives me crazy.) Laptops are right out for serious productivity for me, for this reason. My hands know all the (Windows) keyboard shortcuts in the Ins-Del-Home-End block of keys, so my navigation speed on a laptop keyboard without that usual layout drops to half or worse.

Actions per minute as a metric can go beyond Starcraft. It matters for programming too.

I dearly wish to see the day when neural human-computer interfaces become readily available and accurate. Imagine just thinking 'click' at a toolbar button and there it goes. Not just for typing and programming either, but how about games? Imagine playing Starcraft at the speed of pure thought, with no APM constraints to get in the way...
Very thorough explanation that I definitely agree.

I love watching Soccer and Basketball. In those two fields, the best players are those who dedicate themselves to the game.

Lionel Messi, Christiano Ronaldo, Michael Jordan, LeBron, Kobe. The list goes on. They have the same trait: passion and dedication. Some may have born with the skill (Ronaldo, LeBron). Some takes time to develop (Jordan, Messi).

Having said that, our field is a little bit strange because there's a divide between being good at a particular set of skills and being jacks of all trades.

For example: we tend to argue and discuss the topic of how learning new programming language can change the way you think about a particular problem and hence make a conclusion that those who put the effort and time to learn niche language such as Erlang, LISP dialect, Ruby, Lua get this automatic recognition as a "better programmer". (They may be a "better" programmer if we compare it to John Doe Programmer, but are they truly a better programmer?)

On the other side of the coin, we have people like James Gosling, Bjarne Stroustrup, John Carmack, Dennis Ritchie, Joshua Bloch, Guido von Rossum, Kent Beck, Martin Fowler, etc. that are pretty much sticking with one or two languages but truly focus on their problem domain (as oppose to the languages that they use).

There seem to be a group of people who are good at plumbing different technology and get something out of it and there are another set of group of people who specialized in specific technology but they're just... awesome at it.

Example: A typical blog article explaining the full-stack of technology => "We use Rails as front-end, MongoDB as our back-end, memcached for our caching layer, ActiveMQ for our queueing system" vs "Here's the architecture of Mailinator: Java and Tomcat" (http://paultyma.blogspot.ca/2006/12/architecture-of-mailinat...)

PS: Kent Beck and Martin Fowler may not have the "proper" HN street cred but they are definitely put their sweat, effort, and time to get better at what they do (OOP, software design/development, software process).
Had a good friend who was educated, healthy and ran his own business. He died from an heroin overdose shortly after selling off most of his business assets to pay for his addiction.

Yes, this is one anecdote. But I bet you my anecdote is a fuck load more common than that of the successful New York business man cited in the article.
where are the charts? i'm not buying an article without numbers
@fferen, @jlarocco, @Mon_Ouie, @deckiedan: I know you can probably set up all you need within the blink of a second (using emacs or vim or a template setup).
Actually I'm so hooked on this idea I even wrote my own rake based C/C++ Buildsystem (https://github.com/marcmo/cxxproject).
But still sometimes I prefer not having to set up anything and not having to clean up anything after I end my experiments. ... Idea - drop into REPL and try out - exit - done.
Reason.com is a libertarian blog, generally promoting reduced regulation in all forms.
Does this mean Valve's Source Filmmaker can incorporate some of this stuff now, so anyone can make Pixar-quality movies in the future?
Selection and availability effects should account for this, though.
Yep, the animation technology is trivial compared to the content. Sure, Pixar has good animation, but that's never been what's really set it apart.
AMD GPUs are better optimized for integer ops, whereas on nVidia integer ops are basically a second class citizen.

Also, AMD tends to be more cores at a lower clock rate than nVidia. For embarrassingly parallel integer operations (like hashing) AMD blows nVidia out of the water.
Russell Brandt has an interesting take http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2012/aug/12/russell-brand-...
Sell heroin for $1, just like in American Gangster.
In the past, Pixar chose to hold certain patents close to its chest, and then when 3rd party application developers chose to implement similar features, they had to avoid the patents. This meant that industry standard 3rd party software sometimes had inferior and/or broken implementaions of certain, fundamental technologies. Which caused much frustration when we (Pixar.. I used to work there) started to use those same 3rd party packages ourselves in-house.

Instead of that, how about ... do the research, do the engineering, patent the correct approach, open source a reference implementation, license it properly, and thereby force the industry's hand to "do it the right way" so that Pixar can take advantage of 3rd party tools that implement those particular technologies correctly.

+1 to Manuel, who's been working on this stuff for a while. Cool to see this happen.
Good friend died of an OD at 26. Three others I know who used to use struggled in life while on it. I know nobody who handled it well.
I'm in the exact same boat. About 15 years of web development experience, and I feel the exact same way about iOS development. Challenging, fun and new. My wife and I have a couple of apps in the App Store, but nothing too intense. Would love to hear some advice from others who started off with web development and moved to iOS development full time.
This post could have been written two years ago and it would have been the exact same thing then. "Down with the status quo, here's the next big thing!" Social media and community!
This is fully on my want list. The only thing that would make me happier than this, is if I could feed all the comics I love into the VALVE/PIXAR machine, and cartoons would come out the other side.
The program outputs your site-specific password to stdout. Is it possible for an attacker to get your stdout history?
This was submitted four months ago. See the previous discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3792627
Addiction is a physiological dependence. It has much more to do with your body than your personality.
Looking at my post again, I guess I didn't do a very good job.

I didn't mean 2.5Mb per copy of the JVM. I meant per runtime within the JVM. These are run as threads, rather than processes.

So we're really comparing

n instances of MRI * 50Mb

vs

1 JVM + (n * 2.5Mb)

Where the cost of the JVM itself is amortised over the application instances.

Sorry, what I said originally is easily misleading.
Also last year archaeologists reported discovering a bunch of pyramids using infrared imagery: http://www.smartplanet.com/blog/thinking-tech/how-nasa-satel...
Subdivision surfaces as implemented in RenderMan have been a thorny issue in VFX for many years. Most production facilities wind up implementing their own version of subdivision surfaces for other production tools, but still rely on Pixar's implementation for rendering. The nature of the patents in Pixar's implementation make it hard for individual facilities to match the final subdiv output, and risky to release their own open-source implementation for fear of revealing a patent dependency.

So this has been a long-time coming, and while the quality of Pixar's implementation is undoubtedly welcome, the main advantage to studios is relaxation of the patent requirement - something Pixar should have done years ago, since all anybody wanted to do with those patents was better utilize the tools they had licensed from Pixar in the first place.
One workaround that I've found around the new restriction is opening the "extensions" page in Chrome and simply dragging the downloaded crx file onto it. This should prompt an installation dialog.
I am wondering why is this being discussed on HN today, after 4 days?
Its very nice application
Motorola is notorious for hiring and firing employees every year or two.
> This is one of those things that makes Rubymotion am increasingly attractive prospect for me as an iOS developer.

I've written form-creation and model-syncing code that looks almost exactly like this, but in ObjC.

I'm just not seeing it.
Yeah, I shown my friend once the use of using Super+Direction to snap it in certain directions, he was hooked. For those that don't have multiple monitors or work on laptops, I'd take tiling Aero/Metro any day of the week.
Odd.

1. As a developer I feel that would be a disincentive for me to start developing for Win8 when Win9 is in the pipeline just a few months away. Which one do I actually develop for?

2. Win8 is unproven. I couldn't imagine Win9 would be in a stable enough conceptual stage for it to make sense for them to announce it. They haven't even received wide consumer feedback on Win8 yet and so many things are still up in the air with the OEMs it seems.

If anything it could be Win8.5 -- some cool new additions but 90% of the foundation is the same.
Reason has an agenda they are trying to spread to you. They don't want to live in a world where something the government regulates, actually is dangerous. They want to have their cake and eat it to. "People should be able to destroy their bodies if they want. Oh yeah, and since that is not very convincing to you, here's some statistically insignificant reasons why heroin doesn't hurt you anyway, neener neener. Oh, and now the government can just get rid of the regulations."

Maybe libertarians sometimes feel silly telling people "I know this would destroy people's lives and society would decay but it is immoral for the government to do anything about anything." I don't know why ... :)
Work on music (not necessary sounds) is carried out by the Music Genome Project (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_Genome_Project). It's the engine behind Pandora. There's an incomplete list of attributes used in this classification here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Music_Genome_Project_at....

They still use manpower to classify all those tracks which makes it very hard to scale.
So where's the link?
It covers a lot, but I didn't see much handwaving about the basics of parsing. Particularly the sections that apply to the functionality that people would use lex and yacc for.
Sounds more useful than this. Clicking on hide seems more work than just ignoring the stories.
I just listened to this, which made it sound like there's something out there substantially better than methadone:

http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2012/07/31/157665908/episode-...
>Rather than sell boxed copies of Windows for $119 every 3 years, why not sell an upgrade from the previous version for $40 every one year?

But would people actually upgrade? I think for the general population the current OS is "good enough", why would they pay $40 to break something that works perfectly? (Non-techies _hate_ updates)

>In order to compete with iOS, OSX and Android, Windows has to move to a yearly release schedule.

Maybe they'll just update the "metro" portions every year? Just the UI while keeping everything underneath the same?
Did you actually read the article?
It quoted studies that contradicted exactly what you said.
Most studied people stopped using it at some point.
Indeed, that's what ultimately dethroned Apple in the personal desktop computer business: lots of developer support/embracing and bargain-bin hardware.
A great number of advances in math and computer science can be recognized as someone taking techniques developed in one area and recognizing how they can apply to different area of programming.

You probably already know this, but your insight isn't unique to programming. Virtually all fields progress this way, and Steven Berlin Johnson wrote Where Good Ideas Come From, which is substantially about how, where, and why this kind of borrowing takes place.
Isn't this sort of begging the question?

Sounds like no one should defend H because no one defends H.
>But would people actually upgrade?

Yeah, that's the question. Only supporting upgrades from the previous version puts the pressure on- want Win9 but don't care about Win8? Well, if you upgrade to Win8 for $40 then Win9 is another $40 upgrade. Otherwise it's gonna be $120 to go straight to Win9.

Also- the $40 number is just based on the current Win8 upgrade price.
Flip through the second book in Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy, Green Mars; he examines in detail what such plant life would be like.
It's fundamental research. You don't know what you will get out of it, only that you will get it.
All the things you like about the "traditional desktop UI" were once "the latest UI fads (...) attempt[ing] to appease casual users".
Bug report: I made a gif and halfway through it cut to some other video. Weird. I couldn't pull any kind of unique identifier out of the page to show you, sorry.
Ahh, I have not really dug into shift-reduce parsers, but I am finding the wikipedia article to be surprisingly well written (once you get to the portion about the gramar for the example..)
Lego minifigs?
There is PasswordMaker Pro on Chrome. I use it along PasswordMaker for Firefox and both generate the same password.
You cannot talk about asymptotic behavior ("as n grows to infinity") and "regardless if n is small" at the same time. If you're talking asymptotic, you should ignore the constant. If you're talking about small n, then you can't ignore the constant.
Second that, it's an awesome course. Prof Scott Klemmer knows his stuff real well and is really passionate about the subject.

Highly recommend to take next class when it starts in September.
I like the changes they're making. Post-merger integration is the most difficult part of a deal especially when you have significantly different cultures. I understand "integration" here isn't combining them into one operating company, it is the delivery of Google's vision of what Motorola can become, a vision Motorola thought was wrong prior to the deal (or they would have already been doing it).
An 8 SP1 release is definitely a strong possibility (but not as fun to theorize!).

I'd say that the largest hole in my theory is that Microsoft has fairly high support standards- something like supporting the OS for 10 years after release. If they release a new version every year then that makes patching and support an absolute nightmare. Service Packs since they are free do not (AFAIK) extend the support life of the product.

I disagree with the developer aspect- you target what customers have, but keep an eye on what's coming up. Same thing goes for iOS and OSX developers. As it is now with the Windows ecosystem, it takes eons after the OS is released to actually have enough traction to make sense targeting it.
A great deal of that "number of things" are something that most game developers don't want their consumers to be able to do on the same hardware as their games. And I can't really blame them for it.

(Seriously, the intensity with which they're pushing the "you can hack this!" angle is bothersome from the perspective of somebody who has considered, though now rejected, supporting this thing for a current title.)
Reminds me of all the wildlife studies done after the Chernobyl disaster:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster_effects#Stud...
Politics is generally off topic for this site. See the FAQ: http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I get the sense with Vivek Wadhwa articles that he takes a few anecdotes and generalizes them into a larger trend. He's an imaginative guy, but many of his theories are wildly speculative and lack data.
The way the article (I know it's Nature, but still) talks about "highest possible" makes it sound dubious. Surely there is a printing scale below this at a molecular or atomic level (or even at the sub-atomic level). Saying this is the "highest possible" is terrible scientific reporting because we know of smaller scales we just don't necessarily know how to 'print' them yet.

It's an impressive achievement but I don't think it is the "ultimate".
Chinese Olympic Lego minifigs!
To answer the side question, I think so for two reasons.

1. He certainly could have had his hand in the pot but Pixar is under the control of Disney/Catmull & Lasseter. Jobs/His family are the largest single individual share holder in Disney but its not like he had/has majority say. If they needed to do this to keep making quality films, even if he was in a particularly bad mood towards OSS (say, Linus decided to say something cheery about OS X), they could tell him to go run his own company.

2. Apple, where Steve was clearly king, would open source or give away software at times, likely when it made business sense and not for the sake of brotherly FOSS love. For example: Contributions to KHTML (Webkit) and Clang, and wholly contributed things like libdispatch, Apple Lossless codec, etc[1].

I'm pretty sure Pixar's move here would be considered a good business move.

1: http://www.macosforge.org
Like spoken here. Basically, build and build and build. Even if you have partials that's already pretty good. While a resume full of freelance work is great, if you can show off a few full working apps that are ranging from beginner to 'not bad' then you're basically set. This isn't just applicable to iOS development but to all categories of software development.
Can they just fire everyone who works on MotoBlur?
Because actually using ROOT is painful, and the CS crowd had lisp and now python/pypy.

http://www.insectnation.org/howto/living-without-root

https://linuxfr.org/nodes/18919/comments/632920

http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.c%2B%2B.root/5924
Must be that time of the month to post this page from grantgalitz.org.
Is it too much to hope that someday some of the software at the heart of Pixar's physics simulation systems could be released?

Oh man, that would be awesome. When I went to the legendary SIGGRAPH 2001 Physically Based Modeling course with David Baraff and the late Andy Witkin, they discussed all the ways we could avoid having our numeric solvers "blow up" (basically, when numerical values change too quickly to figure out how to reasonably estimate them). Then Andy somewhat sheepishly mentioned that they don't actually deal with these problems, since their team at Pixar created a direct solver they actually used instead, which solved the many necessary equations symbolically instead of numerically.

This was 2001, so few in attendance had the ability to go off and write an effective direct solver for their project even if they had the right background to do it. So we made do with numeric solvers and patched over occasional blow-ups. That's a picture of how things go. It's not surprising that the pipeline in Emeryville was far more advanced, seeing how Witkin and Baraff created the Maya physics engine as a warm-up for their Pixar system. By now, there are better solvers in many physics systems... yet how much more insanely awesome must Pixar's simulation software be by now?

It's easy to see that this kind of software is highly strategic — Pixar hired world experts to work on this and it must be extremely well-seasoned code, with countless tricky "gotchas" compensated for. It's not hard to see how that gives them a clear competitive advantage.

On the other hand, the potential is enormous. This system is the masterwork, even the life's work, of unbelievably talented people. Erin Catto's work and generosity with Box2D has shown the massive innovation and even cultural value of code like this. How many more amazing things could be created with a simulation engine of the quality Pixar is sitting on?

So although I'm not holding my breath, it would be amazing to see even a small part of their physics simulation in a future open source release. Is that realistic? I have no idea.
That did the trick, good tip. Between this extension and the hckr news highlight new comments extension one can finally be productive reading hn.

Waitaminute...
And yet, the exact same argument applies to alcohol and alcoholics. So, why take the risk of drinking and becoming an alcoholic? For some people who are genetically predisposed to alcoholism, this is exactly what prevents them from drinking, even though it's still legal. Yet, this small chance of being an alcoholic doesn't prevent anyone else from drinking alcohol, so why should it prevent people from doing drugs? It seems as though we run under the foolish assumption that being an alcoholic "isn't as bad", without realizing just how bad alcoholism can get. Double-standards like this are the entire point of the article.
I wonder how this business man was doing with his teeth, pancreas and kidneys.

I also wonder how his control of heroin would hold should he lose his job or his wife.

Isn't the danger of such drugs in the things they whisper to your ears when you're beholding the abyss?
Pixar-quality movies

This is purely subjective and opinion, but it's hard to qualify something as Pixar-quality based on looks alone. Supplemental to the aesthetics and animation of a Pixar movie are the stories, characters, themes and tones woven into the aesthetics.

Just my opinion, though.
From an erlang programmer's point of view, 2.5MLOC are a complex system.

On the other hand, every Hello World in Erlang drags in about 2.5MLOC of liability (even if much of that is never run). And I doubt it's all autogenerated.

So if anything, 2.5MLOC of generated NASA code is probably less complex than the erlang runtime.
I am not sure whether non-techies hate updates. What they hate are _update pains_. And those are larger when you update your software every few years and not all 300 days.

The biggest problem for Microsoft is that they serve the business market as well, where every update has to be checked for compatibility, but that can be solved by long term service releases.

I am not sure whether the parent is right, but I wouldn't rule it out.
> You seem to be implying that markup applied above production cost (for any product and for whatever reason) is immoral.

its not immoral (for an entity should be allowed to price their product at any price they want to), but i want to believe that a free market _should_ control abnormally high markup, so that all produce will cost only slightly more than it takes to produce it.
It's not a matter of taste, it's a matter of performance. Unity and Unity 2D have terrible performance.