skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Most amusing I've seen was Java code that was rather over zealous about DRY and no-string-literals in code (i.e. all strings had to be define as constants).

This resulted in code like:

url = HTTP + COLON + SLASH + SLASH + WWW + DOMAIN_NAME + DOT + COM;

based on lots of definitions like:

public final static String COLON = ":";
public final static String SLASH = "/";
public final static String DOT = ".";
public final static String COM = "com";

[Apologies if this contains any Java syntax errors, I pretty much stopped using Java soon after this experience]

Also I've just realised that I'm really glad Java doesn't have a standard pre-processor - truly evil things would then have been possible <shudder>
I didn't say that they're unique in doing this. I didn't say that it's not the norm, at least in some industries. Though I have to say I've never seen a start-up job ad from anywhere that demanded a photo.

What I AM trying to say is that 1) a photo obviously serves only the purpose of assisting with job discrimination, and 2) I would think that "young, innovative" (my words) start-ups would both not want to discriminate based on irrelevancies for ethical and legal reasons. I would also think that they'd understand that doing so is counterproductive to actually getting sh*t done.

Two anecdotes: On a recent train trip here in Germany I met a guy who was partner in a small consulting business. Very smart guy. Somehow we got on the photo-CV topic and he was astonished that they are unheard of in the States. He then recounted how in his earlier days, working for some other company, they'd placed an advertisement for an office assistant. Most of the replies were from women, and he said that all the guys in the office crowded around the stack of resumes to find the one woman who was hottest. I may be wrong, but in a male-dominated office I find it hard to believe that the "hotness factor" was not ultimately a part of the hiring decision, whether or not it was legal.

This same guy told me that his company "wasn't hiring women right now" due to the risk that a woman employee might choose to have babies. I was briefly in shock at hearing an employer state out loud that his company practiced gender-based discrimination. Obviously, with a photo CV in hand, even if a company was open to hiring women, it could use the photo to try to figure out if a candidate was of childbearing age or not, and reject their applications if so.

Nobody here or elsewhere has justified on any basis the need for a photo with a CV. It's pretty clear to me that it serves but a single purpose: employment discrimination based on appearance, gender, race, and perhaps disability. The fact that it's "common practice" is perhaps a remnant of an earlier time when discrimination based on such things was widely and openly accepted, a situation that I'd hope would have changed, especially in the generally-progressive start-up world.
I guess what Im saying is if you could have a tool that could compare 2 pieces of source code, be able to merge them, and maintain the formatting of each persons local copy it would be great. Its probably a pipe dream because your version control would have to have an intimate knowledge of the specs of any particular language used in the source code (nevermind the version of the language you are using)
COLON + OPEN_BRACKET
Automatic reformatting is the only solution, because you want to be able to make unreadable code readable without conscious effort. My preferred policy would be something like:

1. There is an agreed autoformatting template, checked into version control.

2. It is always ok to format the lines you are working on however you like, with the understanding that other people may run the autoformatter on the file.

3. It is always ok to run the autoformatter on a file you are working on (autoformatters only really work at file granularity).

4. It is not ok to format code you are not working on.
Chronon 4 'Ops' : A new kind of monitoring tool
Yeah, you'd likely need some other way to refer so a position in the code than the line number. Maybe an anchor (like html) or a path in the syntax tree.
So what's a good alternative to the evil empire of eBay/PayPal? In the UK (where PayPal is the only valid way to pay for anything on eBay) there is just Gumtree, which is not an auction site and many categories get barely looked at (and those that do are swarming with scammers too), plus a few small auction sites that have so few users it's not worth bothering.
Maybe we should redefine what newspapers and journalists should do in Internet era.

Reporters from traditional magazines talk to interesting people, write articles and newspapers print them (of course I simplified things a bit).

But today I can directly connect to Elon Musk and Bill Gates twitter feed. I don't need any middleman to read blogs written by experts. How reporters can add value, do we really need them?

Yesterday I've got email from Vint Cerf about free and open web. The question is why this action isn't initiated by journalists?
I think our target markets are different.

Our API is the only product we have, and thus it's the only way we can make money. We think that, over time, that will incentivize us to make the best API possible.

We really admire your product, especially the new Engage stuff, which helps app marketers close the loop between intelligence & personal action in a way that the market hasn't seen before (we'd even like to be customers, once our export-to-Mixpanel feature is done!).

As I mentioned before, we see ourselves as the SendGrid to your Mailchimp. Both play a valuable role and have different use cases.
Best experience I had recently was to repair a 3 month old Lenovo laptop under warranty. At purchase I'd stumped up the $50 dollars or so for onsite service. So within a few days of the call I had an IBM technician turn up at my workplace and swap out its motherboard, no questions asked.
The magic of Just In Time compilation perhaps?
Been saying for years they should be pushing it for games instead of web 2.0 apps (which it is terrible at)
The custom fonts on Chrome (Windows) looks horrible, well known bug for everyone, same time Chrome is the most popular browser in most of parts of the world... are people who are using custom fonts on their pages ignoring this issue because all the designers/developers user Mac's or I just dont understand...
This looks awesome. I have the pleasure of knowing the team behind this, and they are insanely capable people who can do what they say.

Can't wait for the beta!
Not so much strange, as Twilight Zone-esque insane: All methods and properties must be commented with XML.

Sounds like a good idea, until you see how this turns terse and readable code into a bag of chatty noise. Basically this:

public enum ConnectionState {
Disconnected, Connecting, Connected
}

Was not compliant ("There's no comments! It's not readable!"), while this:

/// <summary>
/// The Connection State.
/// </summary>
public enum ConnectionState {
/// <summary>
/// The Connected State.
/// </summary>
Connected,

/// <summary>
/// The Disconnected State.
/// </summary>
Disconnected,

/// <summary>
/// The Connecting State.
/// </summary>
Connecting
}

Was considered Compliant and Good. This example has not been simplified, by the way.
I meant in the case of Dave Ramsey. That guy is crazy.
55% on A-rated companies is way better than the "coin-toss" model of randomly assigning a rating to each company, because there are more than two ratings.
No, I won't. I was just going off on twitter ranting about the quantifiable suck of VOIP client interfaces (proof: http://www.voipsupply.com/blog/free-sip-softphone-roundup) They all suck and the people building that should be aware.

Not only is there nothing wrong with demanding more from our fellow software builders, we should demand more. That's how we make progress.
The OCDock
And it's not only seller protection that is lacking. Twice I've bought broken items that eBay & PayPal refused to let me return (one was a smartphone with broken touch, the other a kindle reported as lost/stolen).

They really, really suck. Sadly, there is little alternative to eBay.
Joel Spolsky wrote a good summary about the Hungarian notation, and how it got corrupted within Microsoft:

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Wrong.html
Not used, but planned. Nuclear propulsion. No real limit on speed, apart from C, although as you go farther/faster you need REALLY big ships to carry enough fuel. c.f. project Orion.
The strangest coding standards were imposed when I was working at an AS/400 shop a dozen years ago.

No indentation allowed. Even though the modern compilers supported it, it looked ugly to veterans who had worked with fixed-format compilers for 30 years.

No comments in the code allowed. The function had to be entirely clear by looking at the code. Any code that needed comments for clarification was considered too 'clever' and 'obfuscated' for production.

No new language features allowed. IBM maintained languages and tools always acquire large amounts of feature bloat over the decades. Only a small subset of these features was 'white listed' by the CTO.
How can it be discredited if it is actually happening?

I'd prefer a race to the bottom than the current race to the top.
Rotterdam, Netherlands, full time, part time or intern: http://planspot.com/

We're looking for talented developers to work in our well-funded fast-moving startup which is developing an all-in-one event marketing platform.

Job description here: http://www.linkedin.com/jobs?viewJob=&jobId=4151144

We're looking for smart people, regardless of experience or the tech they've used in the past.

Email me if interested: chris@planspot.com
the sound rain against a roof top at night, what could be more relaxing ?
Ouya has a much lower barrier to entry than Steam, which is none. Anyone can publish a game to the Ouya market (at least that's my understanding) but for an indie developer, getting a game on steam can be quite difficult. See the recently launched Greenlight website and how many games are on that, trying to get published on Steam[0]. I think the ease of publishing will attract a lot of developers, in the same way that iOS/Android grabbed smaller developers that couldn't get on the old consoles.

[0] http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/browse/?browsefilter=m...
Fair enough.

To be clear, I wasn't attacking tax avoiding companies, but hypocritical MPs.
klass for a variable of type Class is totally normal in Java.
At University we were also forced to do this. This and other stupid rules (like declaring all variables at the beginning of a method) were considered 'good style'.
For those who have not yet stumbled on it, thedailywtf.com is a treasure-store of such golden nuggets.
But they don't. Gruber is perfectly willing to chastise Apple, or link to someone else's criticism, when he thinks it justified. See, for example:

http://daringfireball.net/linked/2012/11/27/chartier

http://daringfireball.net/linked/2012/11/12/drones-rejection

http://daringfireball.net/linked/2012/11/08/kontra-design

I do have to admit that he does take an unholy delight in mocking pundits, stock analysts, or those who play them on TV, who make stupid Apple predictions which prove to be stupid.
The reason people don't give much constructive criticism any more is, in my opinion, largely down to a set of pervasive, poisonous attitudes which affect the tech industry:

1: 'Ship early, ship often' is better than 'take your time and get it right'.

People need to release what they've got because GASP, somebody else might get there first! People falsely believe that the market decides based on speed to delivery, rather than overall quality. Investors might, but customers do not. There are a lot of sucky projects out there, regardless of the specific reasons WHY they suck. People don't have the time or inclination to actually provide useful criticisms, but they do feel the need to voice their disdain.

2: Everyone's a rock-star.

If everyone's a rock-star, nobody's a rock-star. The blogosphere is full of high profile developers and tech evangelists telling everyone how great we all are and how those stuffy 'management' types don't know what they're talking about. The developer is the guru, the shaman, the expert. Well, that's just wishful thinking. If you think you're a genius, you're probably not a genius. You don't have the credentials, the experience or expertise to effectively critique somebody else's project, so you dismiss it as 'it sucks' because you don't know how to articulate the issues you have with it.

3: Everyone's opinion is valid.

This is basically a reiteration of point 2, but I think this is an issue with Western civilisation as a whole. The ease with which people can now publicise their opinions means that people WILL publicise their opinions. There is too much noise, because people think that their opinions are valid and useful. Hell, I'm doing it right now!
I understand the rule, we have this rule in place with a caveat. The rule protects us from a few common events, first being that where some developers just love to tinker with code outside the scope of their project. The second is simply a bad design where the results affected other code in unexpected ways.

There have been a few times were code was reverted and having the code merely commented out saved time, time spent cut/pasting from archive. Even with a good CMS keeping commented out code can serve another purpose, knowing what was when and why. That way we can avoid the "well back in year X we had a rule" because we have the code readily accessible.

For large blocks (subroutines/procedures/etc) it is not uncommon to move the whole to the end of the source.
Any chance we can take this discussion "offline" so to speak? Do you mind if I email you at your gmail address?
Many answers show a common trend: absurd prefixing rules. They're not only useless, but also counterproductive, because they prevent the incremental searches that are present in so many parts of the development tools.

If you prefix every table name with "tbl", you can't search for them in the DB manager console, the IDE table listing, a directory list of the creation scripts, etc.

I suffered an extreme version of this: there was some prefix that was also the directory name. So the files were called "prefix/prefixBlah". Also the prefix was used as class name and the fields were also prefixed with it.

The result was that a reference could become "prefix/prefixBlah/prefixBlah.prefixDoh", an awful noise to signal rate.

I complained without success. That way was "a lot more orderly and tidy" <sigh>.
Far far less than half of companies succeed. So identifying successful companies by random draw is not equivalent to a coin toss. In the case of this study, its 10%.
Yes, for merging, that would be incredibly helpful.

But what I'm saying is that the formatting of a file may contain contextual clues that will help someone reading the code to understand what it does. Formatting isn't just chrome around the code.

Example: In Java, when writing a custom predicate to filter by foos that are bars, I prefer

filter(myList, new Predicate<Foo>() {
@Override public boolean apply(Foo foo) { return foo.isBar(); } });

to

filter(myList, new Predicate<Foo>() {
@Override
public boolean apply(Foo foo) {
return foo.isBar();
}
});

(filter is statically imported from Collections2 in Guava)

especially when there are multiple of them and they line up neatly underneath each other.

Any meaningful autoformatter would change the latter to the former, and in the process loose readability.

EDIT: Another example would be when using the builder pattern - getting those methods to line up to be neatly readable often takes some none-standard indentation.
Founded By 4 Ex-Googlers, QuBit Raises $7.5M
With some exceptions, I don't think brand names are eclipsing the common definitions of the words, but just appending new definitions to them, which can easily be distinguished based on context - not unlike any other non-branded word with multiple definitions.

And we also gain new common words from brands that become generic, like Tabloid or Bikini.
STOCKHOLM anyone? Personally I suck at organizing but if there is some interest maybe I can. :)
That is a great looking tool

As a suggestion, I think you should include the list of features you wrote in this thread in your readme. That list made me really want to try out the tool. If I had only read your readme on github I would not have been as interested.
China prepares to grow vegetables on Mars
In my first job out from school I worked with a bunch of ex COBOL programmers who were re-writing the system in this new-fangled language called "C".

One convention was that all "procedures" should be prefixed with a name indicating where they were in the call graph of the program.

So the main method was always:

int main()
{
a_initialize();
b_process();
c_shutdown();
}

The first function called by a_initialize had to be called "aa_", then "ab_" and so on:

void a_initialize()
{
aa_connect_database();
ab_read_accounts();
ac_read_ledger();
...
}

and so on.

Of course, sometimes you had to write a function that had to be called from more than one place (strange I know!!)

For this, the naming convention "pzzDDDD" was used where D was a digit from 0-9. "p" for procedure and "zz" because these functions didn't belong to any one place in the hierarchy.

We had a print out of the "pzz"s because just the number was hard to remember. But I can still remember a few of them:

* pzz0030 was for looking up account information from the database (but also for maintaining this information).

* pzz0031 for contracts

* pzz0241 I think was for looking up fees and commissions.

Most of the "functions" had lots of parameters so that they could do different things (modify, update, delete accounts etc.). This soon became unwieldy so eventually you had:

* pzz0241_a_setupcharges()

* pzz0241_c_cleanup()

or something. I forget the details for this last bit.

This was in 1997.

Neat huh? ;-)
"saved time, time spent cut/pasting from archive"

Surely source control would be a nicer way than copy/pasting old code back in?
I mostly agree, although I'd like to enhance the bit in point 3 and 4 about only ever reformatting code you're actually working on - meaning, you take responsibility for any code that your autoformatter changes is just as readable as before.

Changing the name of a constant on line three doesn't give you license to autoformat the rest of the file.
Hey Flipkart, why dont you advertise
Thanks for the explanation. The original idea was pretty good.
But I've only, ever, seen the corrupted variant in the wild. And coding standards that enforce it. Hence my annoyance.
The Cloud Unwired – An Interview Series with Cloud Industry Insiders
The Social Network - FaceMash Algorithm Description
These tools already exist: JavaScript tools like minfiers or CoffeeScript can generate source maps which map code lines from one format to code lines in another format.

http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/developertools/source...
Kate Middleton pregnant
Kate Middleton pregnant - http://www.psdmate.com/2012/12/04/palace-kate-middleton-pregnant/
Kate Middleton pregnant - http://www.psdmate.com/2012/12/04/palace-kate-middleton-pregnant/
Kate Middleton pregnant - http://www.psdmate.com/2012/12/04/palace-kate-middleton-pregnant/
Kate Middleton pregnant - http://www.psdmate.com/2012/12/04/palace-kate-middleton-pregnant/
Kate Middleton pregnant - http://www.psdmate.com/2012/12/04/palace-kate-middleton-pregnant/
Kate Middleton pregnant - http://www.psdmate.com/2012/12/04/palace-kate-middleton-pregnant/
"A language should be designed in terms of an abstract syntax and it should have, perhaps, several forms of concrete syntax: One which is easy to write and maybe quite abbreviated; another which is good to look at and maybe quite fancy, but after all, the computer is going to produce it; and another, which is easy to make computers manipulate."

--John McCarthy, http://www.infoq.com/interviews/Steele-Interviews-John-McCar...
No numerics permitted in function names.

Theory: It's prettier.

Reality: Just try to understand the hierarchical relationship between 247 functions in a 10,000 line Material Requirements Planning module of an ERP system when every function name must be all alpha.
With 10 pirated copies for every 1 sale, iOS dev pulls game after just one week
This won't work, except for trivial codebases, I guess. Dean Whelton argued a similar thing once [1]. There are always things that resist automated formatting or that are downright destroyed when using it. I use Ctrl+Shift+F or Ctrl+E,D sparingly for that reason. Eclipse has a tendency to mangle Javadoc comments sometimes. Sometimes you're breaking a long method invocation or formula over multiple lines for readability and not exactly at the 80-char boundary, etc.

Of course, trivial things like braces on the same or next line or whitespace around operators are solvable that way, but in general, as long as source code is text (and it will remain that way for quite some time). What perpetuates this state is obviously that we have lots of tools that deal with text and very few that deal with more specialised content. In general I find this sad, though, as text is often neither easiest to work with nor most expressive, despite of what diehard Unix users say.

What would be really lovely in my eyes woul be a source control tool that actually understood its content and could say "order of parameters of that function was changed" or "method added", etc. It's sometimes astonishing how the pursuit of optimal diffs masks the intent of a change where an added method diff starts with the closing brace of the previous method, for example.

[1]: http://welbog.homeip.net/glue/71/Whitespace_is_not_a_problem
Eclipse has pretty good code-formatting control for Java, quite customizable. It's very nice in that:

* you can elect to turn off formatting for sections of your code
* you can save/export your formatting convention in an XML file that looks like this: http://pastebin.com/fKjKRuZg
* you can import that code convention into new/other projects
* you can select any number of files or projects and choose to apply the formatting to the Java source
* the result is very readable

This might not tie in directly to your source control tool as is but would make taming and standardizing source from multiple developers a bit easier. As long as every contributor's code eventually is coerced into this form your own/central copy can easily be diff'ed across versions. Also, you could apply other conventions with other formatters for clients that see things differently.
I too was forced to do that. I too found it ridiculous. But not for long. There was a utility for generating the documentation strings (it got them right most of the time) and there's a lot to be said for consistency, even if it produces the occasional pointless-looking artefact. The reason this requirement is in the C# style guidelines is because it gives a consistent way of commenting and, of course, allows extraction of documentation and intellisense. I am no drone by any means, but this isn't so insane if you give it some thought.
Common Pitfalls with Django and South
Yes, Scala's improvement from 2.9.2 to 2.10 is better than the improvement from JVM 6 to 7 with this benchmark. Especially for the Eratosthenes test where the time halves from ~1494ms to ~704ms.

The largest percentage improvement from 2.9.2 to 2.10 is therefore roughly 52% (with JDK 7 and 2.10 over 2.9.2). The largest percentage improvement when comparing the JDK versions however is 13.85% where the JDK 7 sundaram test with scala 2.9.2 runs faster than JDK 6 with the same scala version.
>> Even with a good CMS keeping commented out code can serve another purpose [..]

This, here, is your problem.
And don't forget to contribute ;-) thanks