skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Pretty much all your arguments about the Cathedral model being superior fail in the face of the most common cathedrals known to man: Microsoft Windows and Office.

Their inscrutable beauty is buried under tons of libraries nobody will ever touch for fear of breaking 20 years of development efforts, exactly like what happens in the Unix world. Their move to the 64-bit world was painfully slower than what their fellow merchants accomplished in the Unix bazaar. They still provide compatibility layers for programs built with technologies that have been thought of as extinct, like monks still praying to the gods of ancient Greece. Whenever they went for the "total reuse" mantra, they built terrible and insecure specifications (DCOM) that still saddle us 20 years later. And let's not even talk about portability, which is anathema: to each his own Cathedral and his own Faith, touch ye not any unbelievers!

So yeah, making mistakes and keeping around the cruft is something every long-running IT project can experience. Unixes are, arguably, the longest of them all, so the ones that naturally tend to show it more. Besides, there's a whole new world of applications to be built out there, if we were rewriting libtool every three months we'd move even more slowly than we do now.

<ad-hominem>Oh, and I wish I could say your rant is unbefitting of professionals of your age, but I'm afraid it's actually quite matching the grumpy-old-man stereotype you're clearly striving for.</ad-hominem> Hey look, I can do ad-hominem too, and I was born in the late 70s!
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Yes, because every Samsung device in that market looks like a corresponding Apple product. Right. Now, where can I get the Apple product that was copied to produce the Galaxy Note or maybe just that 7" iPad I keep hearing about?
InstallShield was a created by a startup, to give windows-apps a non-insane way of installing themselves.

Microsoft was forced to buy them, almost at gunpoint, by 3rd. party software developers.
1) Thanks, they have a pretty nice app as well!
2) Latest Chrome? Did you try it after a refresh? You can also delete multiple tasks by pressing Ctrl and selecting the tasks, then pressing the red trash button on hover on one of the tasks.
1) corporate culture that dictates that you need to get the code out ASAP and let someone else worry about maintenance

Unfortunately, three months from now, "someone else" is you, and "getting the code out ASAP" means figuring out the spaghetti code you wrote but no longer understand.

In the long run, doing it right the first time helps us go faster. Therefore, it's part of the programmer's job to resist pressure to do it wrong.
Looks neat. It should have a redundant power supply though. With redundant power just one of these could be a good platform for deploying fault-tolerant services.
"Potential cluster in a box" would be a better description.
I also like this http://thewikireader.com/
I wonder why you think that? I suspect it might be related to the focus on "consumer-centric" (as opposed to geek-centric) features. That is one interesting side-effect of the bazaar model: it's great at building what the majority want. If you are trying to build something that nobody is asking for, you can't beat the cathedral model! ;-)

I will tell you, though, that Snow Leopard missed its ship date by 8 months (of course, you never heard about that because Apple is smarter than to announce an OS ship date before it goes GM). It was also nearly un-usable for about a month, and only marginally usable for two months beyond that, during development. Lion suffered from none of these issues...
> [...] Yep, we’re talking about Generation Y — loosely defined as those born between 1982 and 1999 — also known as millennials.

And then 1 paragraph later:

> [...] at age 30, I consider myself a sort of older sister to them

Ummmm...

2012 - 30 = 1982
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I'll happily be "so brave" and reiterate a simple truism of software development -- comments are the battle cry of terrible developers.

They are the crutch of people who can't read code: "Add more comments because otherwise I can't make sense of what the statements are doing." It is the English speaker demanding that every French passage have an English translation, rather than simply learning French.

They are the crutch of people who can't write code. "My code is a gigantic, illiterate mess, so instead read the comment at the top that has no guarantee of being robust or accurate."

Bringing up mathematicians and Knuth are both irrelevant distractions. Software development in the modern world is a very structure, self-describing affair, or at least it should be. Comments are the short-circuit from having to figure out how to do that.
And thank god none of them are interoperable. Oh wait, no, that sucks, massively.
Great article.

A side point, but one that is more interesting to me: in my social circle, I'm the only person who actually Googles everything. When I sit down to have a conversation with most people, and questions about facts come up, I instinctively start Googling. Almost no one else does this. People will prefer to spend an entire conversation trying to guess the population of e.g. Greece, rather than spend 5 seconds to just find it out.

And they don't seem much interested in the answer when I provide it, actually.
Windows and Office are actually not examples of cathedrals, because the architectural focus of Microsoft was not on software but on a near-monopoly market.

You diagnosis of its qualities are spot on.

"ad hominem" means to "attack the man", ie: I single identified man, saying some generalities about identifiable groups is not "ad hominem".

And yes, I am a grump old man, and a surprisingly cheerful one at that.
How To Prepare For A Commercial Office Move
As I said, you seem to be claiming that Python is a superset of Java, not equivalent to it, and that claim is manifestly false. Errors that are detected in one place and not in another are a manifest difference.

Also, Java threads and anonymous classes do not translate directly to Python.
Am I allowed to comment on this if I'm not a coder? I design and work on my startup (and occasionally do coding tutorials) to music anyway.

I can't do stuff with lyrics if I'm really trying to concentrate, so I stick to indie instrumentals like...

Ratatat, Delicate Steve, Mice Parade, French Paddleboat

Otherwise, old school jazz like...

Gerry Mulligan, Hank Mobley, Horace Silver

And sometimes Jamaican style ska like...

The Skatalites, Blue Beat Players, Jazz Jamaica
Username, Password, No SSL.
Sure, why not?
>(a 1988 Olympian.)

In that case the strategy worked really well. You should seriously consider it for your kids :-)
3) The code was indeed obvious for the people who had worked on the project for a while.

When you get familiar with a domain it is very easy to get blind to what people without exposure to it will consider obvious or not.
Interestingly this happens with a certain group of friends as well. They are high-school educated people that have no intention of attending a post-secondary institution. As a corollary, another group of friends that have attended a post-secondary institution are usually the first to join in my quest for facts on Google or Wikipedia.
You could interpret that a few different ways, but I read it as either "the current best selling phone (iPhone?) would be worse (and not necessarily best selling) if Samsung did not copy Apple" or "the best selling phone if Samsung did not copy Apple would be worse than the best selling phone when Samsung did copy Apple."
A few things.

My comment doesn't exclude what happened having other causes.

But more importantly you've hit upon an important point which is it's not what people think of you but what you think people think of you.

The guy driving down the street who thinks he's hot shit in the fancy car, well, assuming it makes him happy the important thing is more what he thinks of himself driving that car than what anonymous people on the street really think.

I know a person who would revel and think they were sooo great for doing the smallest things (say getting an extra discount at the store or finding a good seat at a concert). It pumped them up and made them feel good. They had no self doubt and high self esteem. They just thought they were so smart.

What's wrong with that? As you say "hey whatever keeps this guy happy".

Of course there are always those (the parent you responded to) that will rain on a parade.
Yes. Super cars are not best selling cars.
Pretty much all I've ever wanted to do is walk down an up escalator (and vice versa) at just the right pace that I don't move. Then run a bit faster, slow down a bit, etc. All my earthly ambitions boil down to this.
Java is suited and even powers some powerful crawlers like Heritrix (archive.org) and Nutch (Apache foundation).

That being said, it doesn't really matter what language you write your crawler in: its performance will much sooner be influenced by other aspects (network latency, storage, etc) than the language you choose.

So pick the language you're most comfortable with for crawling and offload the data processing to a lower level language that is better sooted for that task.
That does't actually answer the question at all. :) You could easily accomplish that on reddit with some simple moderation. What actually makes this different?

Note, I'm not just trying to be negative, I'm truly curious as to how this is different.
Britain and Ecuador: Asylum for Assange
Using GNU Stow (symlink manager for 3rd party packages)
That's awesome! I wonder if there are any options with a bigger screen, or if any of the ereaders can be made to store wikipedia locally.
If the author's open-source credentials are part of his argument, then he needs to make them part of the story he tells in his article. He shouldn't assume that people will connect the dots (he doesn't have the name recognition of a Torvalds or Stallman). Further, even with the context, I don't think the dots add up to enough of a picture to understand what he's arguing for/against.

To make a convincing argument, he should have made it clearer what he was arguing against ("the bazaar" is too nebulous and refers to many things, .com development refers to other things) and what he was arguing for (which was entirely missing, other than a reference to Brooks' book). If he doesn't have a clear vision of how development should work (or a "standard-bearer"), he should have at least provided some examples of things working the "right" way (or better).

He should probably also have left off a bunch of the insults and hyperbole: "clueless" / "hacks" / .com period a "disaster" for code quality. I'm frankly pretty surprised that ACM Queue would publish this.
HN has different technology that allows for unique moderation that creates a different community.
Yeah why wouldn't I want to give a random website the keys to my blog?

Flagging this as dangerous spam.
The problem with this is that while it's super easy to look up facts, it's also super easy to spread false information on the web and make it look official and correct. It's quite amazing how many conspiracy videos are on youtube (along with 'true believers' sharing them on facebook). You can look at it as enabling niche information to get out, or you can look at it as a mass fleecing of a generation.
No my friend: This article was written by M.G. Siegler. He accepted that the iPad was the future the moment Steve Jobs told him so.
iOS, and most of the stuff that comes out of Apple other than the hardware, does not have a single designer. This is one of the greatest myths that Jobs promulgated. He did not hand down directives from on high. Quite the opposite. He waited for new ideas to come from his engineers, then he would wield veto, but that's all.
Don't Just Charge for the Hard Stuff
Pre-seed google with your BS and SEO it to page 1.
Ask HN (/Show HN?): Beta released, what next?
Hi all - long time lurker... First time posting.

I recently launched a private beta of my weekend project (easyretirementplanning.ca if you want to provide some feedback!), and now I'm unsure of what to do next.

The folks I've had try it out had positive reviews, and a number of suggestions that I can implement over the next little while. My question is what is next? How do I decide whether or not to take this to the next level?

As this is a financial services application, there are significant legal & regulatory hoops I will have to jump through prior to charging for the product. Not that I don't have the drive/interest to do so, I just don't want to put even more time behind something that may not take off.

I suppose in one sentence - "how do I determine from a private beta if I have anything even resembling product/market fit"?

Thanks!!
when you go to follow us -> gravityonmars
Well, reddit just isn't meant for searching by topic and finding a list of resources. Aside from the obvious thing like it's not focused on news/updates type reading.. it allows you to very quickly find a set of tools. Try googling 'web design tools' and youll see it's kind of a pain. Try finding that on reddit and you may find a few threads on the subject but what if you want it for a specific language?
For me, it's stuff like my quad core iMac becoming unusable under heavy disk activity, or issues like scrolling web pages being impossible when running (quasi) full screen video in a dual monitor setup, or mouse lag under ML.

Minor irritations like reworked Spaces and full screen mode making a second monitor pointless are irritations, but I wouldn't regard them as reflective of the quality of Lion and ML.
Because it's DRY-Principle. It's doesn't matter trivial or not. If you distribute you 'trivial' constructions over whole application, you doesn't have any chance to have consistent, robust processing. If you collect/group things logically, you can easy find out where you (re)use constructions and what you can break, if you change it.

It's not over-engineering, it's just how to deal with >300 People and >6 years projects and not to have "design dead software".
The Web is now old enough to drink! Let's buy the Web a drink.
Cool. Now if only FOSS would adopt a non-insane way of installing software...
2012 - 30 = September, October, November, December 1981 && 1982

Dates are weird.

Having a birthday at the end of Dec., 1981, I am close to being the last Gen.-Xer.
If that were true, then why is Apple copying Samsung? http://allthingsd.com/20120803/apples-eddy-cue-saw-market-fo...

There's never going to be a true counterfactual to whether Samsung would have innovated more or less if Apple hadn't come up with the iPhone. One thing that I will say: Samsung sure sell a lot of phone for a company that isn't innovative.
Goodbye Intellect, Hello Dogma
'Radiation' is not a single unified thing. You can shield some things chicken wire with multi inch holes in it. Other can travel though the earth before hitting you. On of the basic problems is some of the things that help you vs one type of radiation makes other things worse. Also, Mars missions are multi year affairs so even at background radiation levels on earth you are going to have problems.

PS: If you added up the entire mass of everything ever put into orbit you would not be able to make a shield to guarantee normal equipment would be able to stand a 5 year mission in space.
Python isn't type safe (but Scala). Especially for you I wrote "you can do this better with ... guava, it's just example" :)
What I find funny in that is that when I'm in a social circle, we usually don't have quick access to the Internet.

Is using a phone for browsing (I guess that's the only way you could) during a conversation that common?
Clearly, but I didn't used to bother with typing that since it's twice as long as my actual query and most of the time it was the top result anyway.
A lot of good advice there; many thanks.
"Quality happens only when someone is responsible for it."

I admire that as an example of good headline-writing: it tells you one of the important points that the article wants to make. I find it interesting to read this piece in light of recent discussions about Worse-Is-Better vs. The-Right-Thing: I read PHK as arguing definitely from a The Right Thing perspective. I find his argument appealing, but I'm not entirely sure that I'm persuaded by it. On the appealing side, I look at Apple, Python, and emacs: things I use every day, things shaped unmistakeably by someone with vision, authority, and taste, and think that there's got to be something to this argument.
I wonder if there would be any merit to WordPress building native oAuth provider support into core? There are some plugins that do this, and WordPress.com offers oAuth provider support, but having it across the board would be cool. This would (hopefully) help mitigate situations like this.
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The Bitcoin Wave
I am afraid that the principles of Agile was clearly espoused by Tom Gilb in 1988, long before the Manifesto etc.
He called it Evolutionary Programming but it is pretty much Scrum.

see: Tom Gilb Principles of Software Engineering Management (1988)

We do have an awful tendancy to reinvent the wheel, but I think that building Cathedrals vs building Bazaars is the wrong metaphor - I prefer building simple vs building complicated.

The "bad" people PHK describe are building complicated.
The "good" people build as simple as possible, but no simpler.

edit: 1992. Only been building bungalows.
The majority wanted to have scrolling inverted?
Ask HN: Please review my new product Tour My App
The pitch: A big challenge for web app developers is quickly engaging their users. Tour My App allows you to add guided in-application tours and messages to your web apps. You can use it to orient new users, highlight new or advanced features, guide users through specific tasks, show guided demos of your app, and more.

Link: http://tourmyapp.com
The fact that this hasn't happened already tells us that
the practical difference isn't big enough to justify
expending a lot of effort on switching.

Are you arguing that it can't be a good idea, because if it was a good idea it would already have been done?
And they don't seem much interested in the answer when I provide it, actually.

I'm the sort of person who would happily spend an entire conversation trying to guess the population of Greece and frown upon anybody who tried to Google it. I like the fun, social 'game' of trying to work out random stuff from a few first principles . Having someone Google for it and tell me is like someone telling me the ending of a movie. Sure it saves me the two hours having to sit though the movie, but it kind of misses the point. It's not like I actually care about what the population of Greece is.
We have integrated with Jira and Pivotal Tracker for now (though we plan for more in the future).

The way that replay works is that we actually take the screenshot from the current dom state (after disabling javascript and all the moving bits). So even if it is a very dynamic site (like the customink.com lab: http://www.redline.cc/bug/152570393#vdb_box_1) we are able to reproduce exactly what the bug reporter saw.
At first I thought it was just a marketing page to see if there is interest, but on the spec sheet it says "Order now from Codethink for September delivery", but again, no price
I've noticed this happening to myself, too. There's something about the Amazon brand that has built up trust for me.

100% of the time, I'd rather buy a product sold and fulfilled by Amazon (BIG bonus if it's prime) then some random third party seller who will charge $40 for shipping via the USPS in 10-20 days.
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26 years ago I wrote a BAT file ("kristen") for the household MS-DOS computer, which would play Christmas carols whenever my two-year-old daughter typed her name on the keyboard and pressed the return key. She learned quickly to switch the system on, wait for the boot sequence to complete, and play music All By Herself.

It was a revelation: kids as young as that don't have eye-hand coordination enough to scribble recognizable letters, so grownups tend to underestimate their cognitive abilities. But give 'em an opportunity to type, and their world expands explosively.

Kristen's own son just turned three last month, and you can't tear him away from his iPad.
Offtopic: I never bother to click through to the second page on those newspaper-gone-blog sites. This blatant cry for ad impressions is just disgusting, IMHO.
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They're a bit worse. I had one international edition math textbook in which numbers in some of the math problems differed from the US edition. I learned this primarily because I bought the US edition "student solutions guide," which is a whole other racket, and the solutions were often slightly different.

Just enough that someone doing those problems out of the book for an assignment would be hosed. It didn't hurt me because my prof assigned his own homework problems, but still, hugely annoying.
no comments?:) It is better than the dart edtor!
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You are not allowed to use "wordpress" in the top-level domain name. It's a trademark issue.

http://wordpress.org/about/domains/
Start paying attention, you're looking at your future.
That's interesting, but completely counter to my experience. I finally discovered that my most intelligent friends (programmers, teachers, businesspeople) enjoyed the challenge of reasoning to an answer, and felt a sense of triumph and join accomplishment when they got the answer (however close or far they were when they grabbed an iPhone to check their work). They cherished the shared experience, and remember it fondly.

They couldn't give two shits that I had wikipedia.
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Your hubris is certainly self-documenting, if it gives you any comfort.
Orkut and Google Plus: Do you need two answers for a single question?
Good question; I'm very interested in RoR, but coming from a more static language/framework like CakePHP and ASP.Net MVC3, I'm confused on how to use it correctly.

Let's so someone enlightens us. :)
We have talked about doing this. The problem is that when a developer goes to fix a bug they want to see (at least in our estimation) an exact replica of the state that the bug occurred in. We thought that adding in anything that changes (or anything dynamic) would just be confusing when it came time to repair the bug.