skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
He never said "all". In fact, he specifically says: "If you don’t create 'boring' software for a living, then this article doesn’t fully apply."

And it is relevant to concentrate on the boring side of software because, as he also points out: "Only a select few get paid to develop 'sexy' software, whereas most of us are stuck developing the boring stuff." It is not trivial to "pick up computer vision", much less get a job in it.
Why not write a journal article and broadcast on Twitter? This surgery doesn't seem to be groundbreaking research worthy of a new journal article; it's just that enough people didn't know about removing tumors without taking the entire kidney. By tweeting, they got noticed on Twitter, CNN and HN. A brilliant work of PR.

Full text link:

http://edition.cnn.com/2009/TECH/02/17/twitter.surgery/index...
"If you travel through Italy, you can’t help but notice the many Roman bridges that still stretch across that nation’s waterways. How is it that the Romans could build bridges that would last thousands of years, while the ones we build today collapse after a few decades?"

You don't see bridges that have already collapsed thousands of years ago =)
The Futile Pursuit of Happiness (2003)
The tinyurl goes to this article:
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9E0DEFD61538F934A3575AC0A9659C8B63&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=all

HN was bouncing me to some old NYTimes submission when trying to post that original link.
There are a few issues.

A number of hacks involved downloading the database of some websites. Usually this involves defeating the operating system that runs the website (or a server in the same datacenter) and FTPing the database away. Now the thieves have every username and every password, and can log in and abuse the system as needed.

People tend to use the same username/password combination everywhere they go. In the early days of Everquest, there were a number of websites set up just to harvest usernames and passwords, and about 5% of the EQ userbase used the same username/pwd as their game accounts. Steal one forum database (which is probably why the efforts to crack vBulletin and phpBB), or set up your own honeypot, and harvest a number of game accounts to loot and plunder. This applies to other games as well, not just evercrack.

The reason for the love of hashing is that it is one-way. There isn't any feasible method for reversing it. While things like rainbow tables can make crackers' lives easier, it still puts the burden on them.

Backup tapes get lost. Crooked employees have been known to sell access, account info, or whole dumps of DBs. External opponents aren't the only threats, you have malevolant and stupid internal threats to deal with as well.

http://www.csoonline.com/article/print/480589

http://www.csoonline.com/article/print/479038
Yes, that bit about the bridges is pretty bogus. A lot of stuff in the ancient world fell over. It seems to us that ancient architecture can last thousands of years because it's now thousands of years later, and the things that lasted are all that's left.
> it leaves no room for being wrong

Precisely and concisely the problem. Now, I am particularly interested in some discussion (somewhere else) on how or whether a "best of both worlds" is possible. Knowing that there are education specialists in both cultures, I can only think that 1. it is unsolvable and everything is compromise, 2. there are fundamental cultural incompatibilities, or 3. the specialists are clueless.
Well, there's uninventive, and then there's directly copying every move, sometimes literally by cutting and pasting. Though I suppose they say good artists copy, great artists steal. Maybe TechStars are great and just seem lame to me.
I think a really great example of this is the "One Minute Manager" and similar management books on the market. They try to give you rules for managing the people you work with, without considering the human / personal element of the job. I have known people with managers like these, and they always fail. People catch on pretty quickly.

One of the good trends in software (IMO) is that in rejecting rule-driven ways of running projects (like waterfall, RUP, etc.), people across the industry have basically agreed that the right way to build software is to make it a human endeavor again, thus Agile, XP, etc. The bad trend I see is that some people are trying to create rule-driven systems out of Agile and XP (e.g. 99% unit test coverage required, or you must pair program every line of code in the system). This makes my head hurt, since it is so against the spirit of the Agile manifesto.
If TechStars made a video or a paragraph explaining it, and YC actually cut and pasted that into their site, then yes, I would claim that.

I'm not knocking TechStars for doing a similar thing. I'm knocking them for copying it line by line (often by cutting and pasting) and not innovating at all. Good businesses often borrow ideas from successful competitors, but they never copy them entirely. They always seek to improve.
I'm proposing a theory for this, sort of like Godwin's Law:

Stories about the soul-warping power of wealth increase in number with increasing material prosperity. They peak some time after the onset of a financial downturn. If the downturn is severe and long-lasting enough, they become so unpopular as to be unmentionable.
Google Sync Uses Microsoft Technology To Take On Apple
Us Rubyists are used to using curl for testing our REST apps. What additional help/insight can netcat provide when building REST apps? Or Rails apps in general? Is there any?
How Twitter Makes Things Faster: A Timeline
Substitute "reckless greed" for narcissism and this article would be more acceptable for me.
As the submitter, I read this and thought: gee, this is sure to get a very profound reaction from the guys over on HN. It has all the touch-points: elite education, the recent financial downturn, faith in models.

Also it's written poorly and follows no train of logical thought. It's more like story-telling or something you'd hear at a bar.

If you don't like it, flag it. Apologies for taking your time. But if you're going to multiple post about how much you dislike it, if nothing else it's kicked you in the head a bit.
Watch Dollhouse Online
I think that if I were going to that much trouble to investigate a candidate, I really have too much time on my hands.
a firefox extension like tamper data is much easier than doing all that - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/966

or just use a sniffer like wireshark and let it reconstruct the tcp stream - http://www.wireshark.org/
By a similar logic. Somebody told me that in the past people used to live longer. The proof was that he knew a lot of people that were 70+ and they were still alive. Of course he never met all the people that died young!! ....And he does not know how many of us will live to be 70+
Matt Benwell - QuickFire Profits 2.0 | Quickfire profits Review Bonus
The Quickest, Easiest Way To get your hands on all the Webmaster Tools you will ever need…QuickFire Profit members will also get Bonuses free software when we develop any to easy and speed up the process and we’ll also give you the chance to have a say in any new software we’re creating.
In the article he claims it costs $68k/year to run.
I see. I wonder if this philosophy works at Apple. Do you really think apple products would be better if Steve Jobs always deferred to his staff by saying "you're the expert." Ridiculous. All of this stuff is very situation specific. I am sure that is what he does at Pixar (probably less) and not at all what he does at Apple, and rightly so.
It was, but there is no reason you can't swap out the keyboard, the os supports it. Some carriers will want alternative IMEs, after all.
Sega’s 2009 survival strategy: Publish mature-rated Wii titles and exploit Sonic brand
State of the Computer Book Market 2008, Part 1: The Market
Microsoft Flight Simulator:  Sorry, but you will not be missed.
Bloggers Paradise
I read this on RealClearPolitics this morning. I really enjoyed the parallel between engineering in Rome and the financial system. Less information makes you more careful...
SynthaSite Gets A $20 Million Boost For Simple Website Creation Software (Acquired Clickpass)
I love stories like this. Web! Easy! But the title is misleading.

* The guy did a year of off and on market research.

* He's extremely well-connected and/or an incredible talker, getting a good design firm and a hosting firm to contribute their part for free.

* The app is apparently so simple that he didn't bother to explain what it does. It matches ingredient text against some few dozen recipes.

In the end this simple web app is just an ad, a bagatelle, a portfolio piece. They are supposed to be just simple enough to show off your talents.

Anyone out there with stars in your eyes, please don't think you can build the next Google or even Twitter, in 5 days.
Read Fark for the Pics
Take one part regular expressions, one part ColdFusion and one part Fark.com and you can see all the pics posted on the story comments minus all the comments.
I've read similar numbers elsewhere, but came to an entirely different conclusion. Wall Street lured a lot of really smart people by promising them a lot of money. Then, in turn, they asked of those same smart people to create as much money as they could, as fast as they could. Smart people are good at solving problems, so they created all sorts of new and interesting ways to make money quickly. Nobody in management worried about the long-term ramifications and didn't ask the smart, creative folks working for them to worry about the long-term either. Blaming computers or Harvard or narcissism is illogical. Greed trumped foresight while they all got rich, simple as that.
Are you developing mobile apps for other app stores? (not iPhone)
Nokia and RIM are releasing their App stores for S60 and blackberry phones in the coming months. Are you developing for them? Why or why not?
I met him at ROFLCON in Boston and spent a while chatting with him about career stuff. Sadly, I suspect that the thing they mentioned about Boston might have been some people I put him in touch with. I never followed up on what happened there. :/

He is a bright guy and he can/will do great things once he figures out the right way (for him) to extract a good professional presentation of his skills and experience from the quagmire that 4chan can be.

My personal opinion is that he needs to find some start-up that is trying to do something edgy in the social scene and hook up with them to be a coordinator/moderator/facilitator. He knows a damn lot about how a large social group like 4chan can ebb, flow, and eddy.
How To Encourage Women in Linux
Business models for games
It is incredibly useful for us kids just now learning about algorithms and trying to see if the problem described in the text book is reducible to a known NPC problem.
This is a great idea. Why hasn't any one done this before?
Ustream Launches Watershed, A Pay-As-You-Go Live Streaming Service For Enterprises
A quick question, you said that the CAPTCHA is implemented across various login screens. Do that mean that you have to fill a CAPTCHA everytime you login ?

I don't know what your application do, but what is wrong with automatic login? I understand why automatic account creation IS a problem, but use automatic login is something I use everyday (via 1password).

But if you really need to do it, Tichy solutions seem goods
I'm sure some people might dismiss the list immediately because they're not game developers. But keep in mind that many of these points could be used seamlessly for apps (Facebook, MySpace, Yahoo!, etc etc) or even your own website. Good stuff!
To me, boring programming implies having to perform a repetitive task that requires little mental effort. I don't think I've ever come across a programming problem that was both dull and not potentially automatable.

The difficulty with automation is that it can take longer than solving the problem by hand. But I'd contend this is a short-term viewpoint. First, very few problems are entirely unique; there's always some general component that they have in common with other problems you may have, even if that general component is not immediately obvious. Automating a system now almost always means less work in future.

Second, at least in my experience, a programmer would much rather write a program to do something boring than do it him or herself. Automating a repetitive task is immensely satisfying, especially if it continues to save time again in future. If you work for a company that encourages programmers to automate everything, you're probably a lot more motivated than a programmer that has to do something excruciatingly repetitive, and a lot less likely to be checking recruitment agencies.

When I starting working for my current employer, a lot of things were hastily done and there was a lot of repetition. Over time, we've snuck in hours here and there to improve our processes. Not as much as I'd like, but enough that we've slowly made progress, and each time we've automated something it's been an interesting and rewarding task. After suffering through manually doing X for the last N weeks, it's very satisfying to ensure you never ever have to do that again.
Which autobiography? (I found more than one)
I just bought X-plane a month ago with a yoke. I gatta say, I've been really impressed. It still doesn't feel like actually flying (somehow the time seems skewed) but I love that I can walk through my lessons digitally with as much, if not more, detail.
I recently set up Facebook Connect on my poetry editor web app. When a user writes or updates a poem, they can have a link published in their news feed. Being very far from a lawyer, can anyone tell me whether the fact that the link is published to the feed now means that Facebook owns that the content on the other end under these same terms?

I noticed something about using the "Share" link, but I don't know if that's considered the same thing.

Appreciate the insight!
There are plenty of examples of programmers writing systems that are too grandiose to solve simple problems, as well as programmers writing systems that are hacky and not reusable enough.

Too many people are looking for a definitive silver bullet on either edge of the spectrum, but there is none. Every problem will call for a solution that is somewhere in the middle.
One page print version:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/02...
Absolutely. I already wrote in another part of this discussion "Most of the things one wants or needs to do on the net are most easily accomplished with dedicated tools, so places where only netcat will serve are rare." On the other hand, my little trick does just take a few seconds, and is probably easier than getting ethereal (oops, wireshark) set up for someone new to it.

I do think it's still useful to be aware of and play with tools like netcat, even when there are dedicated tools to accomplish most tasks. It's a bit like hacking in assembly... probably not practical in many cases, but you'll learn how stuff works underneath, and that understanding can still be really useful even when working at a higher level of abstraction.
Social Network Downtime in 2008: LinkedIn Up - Twitter Down
I'm not sure there is such thing as an inherently boring software project. You can approach it in a boring way, but given free reign, I daresay a programmer could find something interesting in any project.

For instance, document management is not very sexy software, but Zed Shaw's recent talk on rethinking ACLs was extremely interesting. I'd love to be able to apply my current language of choice (Clojure) to document management, or indeed any type of software that is usually considered dull.

The boring part of software development comes when, IMO, you don't automate something, or are forbidden to, due to time constraints.

But perhaps that's because I have yet to encounter a truly boring type of software project :)
Fermilab 'closing in' on the God particle
so does one thing have to eliminate the other?
Why did you comment? Why not just express your disinterest by not commenting?
Then I guess white isn't a color either since I don't see it on the spectrum
Meyer “sticks it to” the W3C process for its failure to manage CSS-based layout properly:

"The process has, in the last decade, not produced anything even remotely resembling an answer to this problem."
Medical vidcasts.
http://www.or-live.com/index.videoChannel.cfm

They've got a Varicocele Surgery being broadcast live on February 24 at 7PM. http://www.or-live.com/bethisrael/2445/
Vilfredo Pareto on Software Product Management
A conjecture.
Jamie is "running up the flagpole" the 37signals product-description page... and getting some comments, though I find it a little difficult to respond to his (intriguing) “slice” of the page without seeing it all in context.

Looks like a design seeking, foremost, a more "fun" feel. Not sure the result really is also an "informative" feel, IMHO.
MIT's Simile Project Javascript Timeline makes its way to Obama's Recovery.gov
I just listened to this book. It made me happy.
Thoughtful programming and Forth
Interesting how the etymologies for "democracy" and "republic" are essentially the same. :-)
Fifty words on how we've moved from fax to email to social media to twitter.

None of those words mentioning how this abundant "freeness" of vapid information has accelerated intrusion and overload -- way more than it has accelerated sheer speed. IMHO.
The difference isn't in that dimension. The mentor pool in Silicon Valley is massive; probably several times the rest of the country combined.
My favorite nc trick of late is using it in combination with
ssh_config(5)'s "ProxyCommand" directive. "ProxyCommand" tells ssh to
use the specified command's stdin and stdout to communicate with the
destination host, rather than establishing a TCP connection itself. For example, if I can connect to the host "bastion", and if "bastion"
can connect to the host "destination", but I cannot connect directly to
"destination", I can stick the following in my ~/.ssh/ssh_config file:

host destination
ProxyCommand ssh bastion nc -w 1 destination 22

Much cleaner, and easier to manage than tunnels.
The truth about prediction markets
I read this article in 2004 and its even more relevant now.
That's the problem with CNN links. Dig deeper, and you find that the chief resident (not the surgeon) was responsible for the tweets.
Simplicity: The Next Big Thing
I think some analysis and thinking might help with this argument..
http://www.accel.com/company/index.php

Accel is another VC company who's board members overlap with In-Q-Tel.
From: http://www.nzherald.co.nz/technology/news/article.cfm?c_id=5...

The second round of funding into Facebook ($US12.7 million) came from venture capital firm Accel Partners. Its manager James Breyer was formerly chairman of the National Venture Capital Association, and served on the board with Gilman Louie, CEO of In-Q-Tel, a venture capital firm established by the Central Intelligence Agency in 1999. One of the company's key areas of expertise are in "data mining technologies".

Breyer also served on the board of R&D firm BBN Technologies, which was one of those companies responsible for the rise of the internet.

Dr Anita Jones joined the firm, which included Gilman Louie. She had also served on the In-Q-Tel's board, and had been director of Defence Research and Engineering for the US Department of Defence.

Anyway, I'm not saying Facebook is "big brother". I just think DoD is interested in advanced data mining and prediction capabilities. Also, they're interested in recruiting through Facebook, but that's entirely unrelated.
Some particularly intense colors come from iridescence and the slight parallax induced by having two eyes. A standard flat panel can't replicate that.
These are all good points and I agree with you completely.

I think I haven't explained myself well. Firstly I made the mistake of saying "plaintext" when what I really meant was "recoverable", ie encrypted but not hashed. I would never suggest that passwords be stored in plaintext, protected only by operating system and DB passwords. I didn't make that clear and I think I've deservedly gotten some heat for it.

All I am trying to say is that with enough effort, data can be secure, or secure enough. In my job I store customers' credit card information. This must be in a recoverable form. If it leaks I am dead and probably so is the company. Nothing is perfect but I have gone to a lot of trouble and I have reasonable confidence in my efforts.

Same goes for server private keys, financial records, etc. All of it is "ring 0" secure data and extraordinary efforts are made to keep it that way.

I do not actually store user passwords currently, but I know people who do. I have similar confidence in their precautions and skill. Obviously it can be done badly, just like hashed passwords can be implemented badly. But if done properly, I stand by my assertions that storing user passwords in a recoverable format can be no greater a risk than any other part of the system, and no easier or more likely an attack.

I have harped on about this enough, but I'd just like to point out two more things - one, if people enter the same login details to a honeypot then nothing can save them, and two, that crooked employees can circumvent the hashing anyway, either by sniffing inside SSL or just inserting a logging hook. Relying on hashes to thwart crooked employees is folly and could breed complacency.

Hashing passwords is a security layer, nothing less and nothing more. A site's security relies on the skill and care of its architect and staff, not on any single hot topic buzzword. Right, that's enough on this topic. Thanks for the thoughtful reply.
New tech start-ups can rise from the economy's ashes
Idk I'm very happy with T-Mobile's G1, and I'm not even in 3g coverage. Regardless the speeds I get are at least 2times faster then the '3g' I had with Sprint. Very happy with T-Mobile.
Didn't they drop Carbon to force people to "switch to Cocoa already!" ?
It's funny when people try to universalize preferences. Obviously: don't write bad code. But if you're a maintainer, go about maintaining, don't try and turn everyone into a maintainer. Similarly, if you're a creator, don't try and turn maintainers into something else.

Best is to recognize what you love doing, then do that systematically and effectively. But don't turn preferences into rules.
View source on this page:
http://www.allapis.com/The-Golden-Grid/golden7.html

... and tell me what I could possibly be gaining from this system. They've defined a table, with some code that doesn't really look like a table, and they've had to hand-split the text for that specific page so that it would fit into the cells.

I honestly can't tell what part of this is supposed to be an improvement over anything we have already. I had assumed that they had found a way to make content flow into multi-column layouts, but they haven't. They've just discovered {clear:none;float:left;}.

Or am I missing something?
How To Think About Compression
Craigslist is the New eLance, But Better
Monetizing Facebook's Feed is tricky business.

"Your best friend just got dumped by his cheating finance...brought to you by Carl's Jr." will not go over as well as Carl's Jr. intended.

But it is pretty interesting how they microtarget ads. I've seen my staunch republican friend login to facebook. She gets ads like "Do you feel the election was stolen? Voice your thoughts here."

Where as I get ads indie rock music sites and student loan "bail outs".
Future challenges for twitter