skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Bravo, someone has to say it!

It is great to see that folks are beginning to realize that child abuse has become the scoundrels' moral panic mobilized of choice.

Auto accidents were first on the list of preventable forms of death for most ages last I checked (ten years ago) and they indeed don't get the OMG treatment.
As a data point, I have Firefox building under Eclipse/C++ reasaonably well. I had to hack the Eclipse project files to tell it where all the headers were (arguably more a fault of the Mozilla build system), but since then it's worked surprisingly well. I'm under the impression that Eclipse's C++ support had improved substantially in the last year, although I can't say for sure, since this was the first time I'd used it.
Handling Fuzzy Requirements
Why not? It is not even spelled wrong.
Thanks! We want ideas for future sites to hook into, so if anybody else has requests, feel free to post them here...
Twitter seems to be another case of giving away free services online when people value it enough to pay for it.

It would make things easier for all startups if users didn't expect things for free. In the real world, when someone at a store gives you something for free, you look at them, say "Are you serious?!", and walk away dumbfounded. But online, it's become the default.

Maybe startups can change the expectation by charging by default instead of the other way around.
Recently, I was reading a book about sushi, and found out that soy sauce is actually a by-product of making miso.

Early forms of sushi were actually invented inland South East Asia, since they had to find a way to preserve it. It was found that if you put fish in rice and let it sit for months, the fermented rice kills off the bacteria, and keeps the fish edible, even if the fermented rice smelled like vomit.

When the practice migrated to Japan, the lords of Kyoto began to eat the fish earlier and earlier, and found that the rice, slightly fermented, was actually quite good. So, sushi rice came as a by-product of a modified process of preservation for fish.

Later on, somebody invented rice vinegar, so you no longer had to wait months for slightly fermented sushi rice--you just pour it onto freshly cooked rice.
A more useful discussion would be, what kind of apps should be paid? and what kind should be free? In my opinion paid apps/services have to meet a few criteria:

1. substantially better than free alternatives
2. deliver significant value at limited (user) scale
3. not built on open source technologies w/restrictive licensing

For broad consumer-services, those 3 criteria actually limit the universe of services significantly.
Right. Allowing preprocessing with a syntax-specific extension or (ideally) scanning on the AST would be more interesting - code can have be surprisingly similar except for variable names, types, and other semantic annotations. Rather than calling them "patterns" and prizing them, sometimes abstracting them away would be a better approach.

My main focus is on curing the heartbreak of copy-and-paste-programming, but I'm sure it would have more general applications (if I ever get it out of quadratic performance, etc.). Unsurprisingly, what is "similar enough" can be a very slippery concept.
I don't understand what your point is. Are you suggesting that since AMBER alerts are a waste of time and are a tool for "the man" to control us the app should be denied?

What about google's app where you are sending your voice to google? Or maps where you send your position, or search where you send your desires (maps too)? Or loopt? Or countless games that don't save any children?

I'm sure the delay is related to the decision to filter app submissions at all. They probably haven't looked at it yet or are still trying to determine the network impact of running it or who knows. Maybe for potentially popular apps they do a code audit.
You're confusing "sexual abuse" with abduction. While there is overlap, we're talking about two different crimes.

No one is claiming that no one should worry about abductions. But investing significant resources here CAUSES problems because of the opportunity cost -- greater amounts of good could be done by directing the resources to addressing greater risks.

That's the big problem with the "if it saves just one child" thing. There's a finite amount of resources available, so we must prioritize and spend it on the places that will do the most good. Child abductions and Amber Alerts make good news copy, but addressing the more mundane dangers will give a better bang-for-the-buck, and save more people.
"We haven't met a single great hacker that relied on an IDE, although we hear they exist."

The implication here is completely in the negative.

Further, it's like saying "If you want to be a hacker, use English measuring units because we've never any met any great hackers who use the metric system."

Just because a bunch of rails hackers don't use an IDE doesn't imply the contrapositive.
Wish I could give the parent more mods...

I personally touch-type maybe 50 wpm but that's for documentation, not code. If you are attempting to create code at the speed that you type, you are insane ... or you will be soon, when you try to debug it.

If someone was lucky enough to think faster than they could type, they'd be able to think twice before they added more code to a program - a good thing!

Just think. Is wpm a measure of a great writer? How could it be a measure of a great programmer.

I'm not sure what a "great hacker" is. Are they something like sysadmin or maybe someone who does security?
Exactly, and look at IE6... combine the amount of every web 1.0 startup's VC funding and you wouldn't have the number of users that used IE6.

AND they used Visual Studio.

Userbase != great hackers
Long term, but.. niche. At one time, everyone and there mother were writing blogs, and now we have pretty much left it to the professional writers. Wading through all the bs, of messages like going to the store, walking the dog, are completely unnecessary.. no one needs to know, or there are very few that actually care what any one person is doing with 90% of there time. It is useful from a real time news status. Work purposes it could be useful, if more companies embraced short messaging and status updates. Following famous people or celebrities is entertaining. For discussion purposes I still prefer IRC or forums, or message boards. 140 characters is hardly enough characters to post anything useful in my opinion
Could that be because you exclude Windows hackers from your definition of "hacker"?

No, it couldn't. The person out of the group of people that I know personally that I consider "hackers" uses Windows primarily, and knows a bunch of crazy APIs inside and out. He does whip out VS for some stuff, but the vast majority of his code is written in emacs.

I'm not saying the article is right all the time, but I think it's a pretty good rule-of-thumb.

My experience coinciding with the article is more of a function of "I really don't know very many people" than "I don't think there can be such a thing as a hacker that uses windows, or microsoft tools".
Interestingly most of the more spectacular flameouts of Web 1.0 (Webvan, Pets.com, Govworks) were using a more traditional business model.
I think focusing on method length is focusing on the wrong thing. Some of the worst long methods I've seen weren't bad because they were long, they were bad because they had about eight or nine levels of nesting. When a method ends with

}
}
}
}
}
}
}
}

you know you've got a problem. Breaking such a method up into smaller methods would make each shorter, but the big win would come from eliminating the deep nesting.
I think it works both ways. Sometimes people will find something brilliant because it was said with swear words, but wouldn't take much note of it if said with other words. If the idea was not that great without swear words, I'm not sure how the swear words make it brilliant.
Typing speed is important for the reason the article mentions -- micro-interruptions. Most of the time, you just have to type a few words, and the editor will complete the rest for you. Fine. But a lot of the time, you are typing a symbol for the first time, and autocompletion doesn't really help. It breaks your flow if you can't type this symbol quickly and correctly the first time. (It is also worth pointing out that I can type most words faster than it would take to cycle through potential expansion candidates, so I only use it for moderately-long identifiers. Abbreviation expansion becomes less of a time saver when you learn to type more quickly.)

Anyway, a few months ago, I decided I would learn to properly touch-type (and increase my typing speed). It was very difficult at first -- I couldn't type at all, and even simple programming made me really mad. A few months later, I can type significantly faster, and I make many fewer errors. (As an aside, I don't think touch-typing was really designed for programmers. All the important symbols end up under your pinkys, which is not very comfortable. So I compromise and type some symbols like ()- with my ring-finger. This probably reduces speed, but it doesn't hurt my hand.)

The common response to typing is "programming is not about typing, it's about thinking". Sure, that's mostly true. Nobody expects you to sustain 120 wpm typing for eight hours a day. But, it's very helpful to type quickly in bursts, to get your ideas in to code form as quickly as possible. Sketching out that idea in 2 minutes instead of 3 means that your brain has more time to think about the problem, and has to waste less of its time babysitting your fingers. I know I get mad when my typing speed is delaying me from trying an idea as quickly as possible. That's why I decided to do something about it.

I'm glad I spent the time to practice typing. It has made programming and writing more enjoyable, and didn't take much time or effort at all. The dismissive attitude of "programming doesn't require typing skills" is extremely naive.
It can be hard enough to make empirical observations about one's own performance even when not under the influence of a mind-altering drug.

I did once spend an afternoon making recordings of myself playing guitar at different levels of sobriety. Results pretty much as expected :->.
There was a guy I worked with who was one of the most productive people on the team and a great coder. He could type fast, but not by touch - hunt and peck all the way. When he had his ergonomic evaluation, after seeing the way he typed, the evaluator recommended he try voice recognition software. He didn't.
My first R&D project at my company when I just got out of college was in image recognition, so this is pretty interesting.

Here's 2 I did:

http://webdemo.pittpatt.com/recognition_demo/view.php?id=JKW...

http://webdemo.pittpatt.com/recognition_demo/view.php?id=Q9J...

The second one pretty impressive, even if it's under the default 0.00 threshold. I mean, RMS's mouth is obscured behind a katana and it still got a -0.14.

You need to work on the PG recognition though. It doesn't seem to want to recognize two photos as being both him. :P
Typing ability is an effect rather than a cause of hacking ability.

It's not so that you can type code quickly. The bottleneck in coding is always the thinking time, or you're using an overly verbose language.

Typing is important because hackers communicate with one another using a keyboard. I've worked with programmers who couldn't type quickly enough to have a comfortable conversation over IM. It's torture.

If you can't type, it's probably because you're not communicating enough. Hacking is not a solitary activity, and it's mostly not coding.
"We haven't met a single great hacker that relied on an IDE, although we hear they exist."

Sounds like GiraffeSoft folks don't use languages with type info and a graphical debugger. I certainly wish TextMate could handle static info and had a JVM debugger. I would love to code scala in TextMate.

The IDEs are too heavy. I don't like them. But if you want/need a debugger and type info for refactoring and exploration, you don't have much choice.

The other three items they list seem on target. The one about great coders don't use IDEs is highly dependent on what language and kind of code your writing.
I wasn't saying that at all, as I mentioned, free will always exist.

The problem is that investment is aimed at companies that hit home runs. While you might be able to make a nice chunk off of advertising (i.e. enough for a few founders to make a great living) that isn't what investors look for. Ad-supported companies have to hit big home runs, or investors will move their money elsewhere, and founders will trend toward places they invest.
I'm not positive but I think that there have been studies that show that a programmer's output in LOC per day is fairly constant no matter what the language is. I could imagine this being similar -- maybe about 150-200 "operations" is the right number, no matter what level of abstraction those operations are at.

That's an interesting point about the setup code though. When you have to do explicit memory management, there may be a greater cost to dividing a long method into several smaller ones.

In general, splitting up a function into smaller ones might just have a greater cost in those languages. It's also possible the development tools are a factor -- it's a lot easier to jump between various methods in Eclipse than it is in vi (for me, anyways).
I hear they exist, I've just never met them. That could be my sampling bias. None of the people around me relying on IDEs are great hackers.

Instead of arguing about what might have been implied in what I wrote, I'd rather you introduced me to people you consider great hackers that use an IDE. Know any?
As someone currently in a large cubicle farm chock full of senior ex-DEC code monkeys, your statement rings true.

As I used to work for a startup, I can definitely feel a real cultural deference from the old timers, who are all brilliant hackers but just can't imagine anything other then a DEC-like work environment.
Alternate Reality Games: What Makes or Breaks Them?
I think this Roger Ebert column I recently came across is appropriate here.

http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2009/02/hunt_not_the_snark_b...

It is really easy to take anything and find the bad or imperfect parts of it.
The thing behind what is said is "get your eyes off of the nice UI. Look and type code".

Hmmm. I'm currently working a project targeting handheld devices written on the .NET Framework, meaning I'm using Visual Studio. Currently, my IDE looks a whole lot like an instance of Vim or TextMate--no widgets outside of the top level menu displayed, and I typically use keyboard shortcuts for builds, navigating, etc, etc.
Attaching value to content
Learning vim (edit: or emacs) is another step in the same direction (less transition to the mouse.) I agree that raw typing speed isn't that important. What I like is being able to see what is in my mind show up on he computer without too much hassle, so I can focus on a) perfecting my mental model of how the system behaves and b) creating a new model for the system.
No Laughing Matter - Presentation Tips From The World Of Standup Comedy
Poll: Ban Codinghorror?
I'm really against censorship, but this does not mean we are free to do whatever we want. I believe that people should know and practice self-restraint. Jeff Atwood, through his blog, has consistently failed to exercise such self-restraint.

I wouldn't mind ignoring his stories that show up here, but the recent posts where he

(a) criticizes the decisions that drive News.YC despite of being ignorant of how things work

(b) recommends news.YC to his subscriber base, potentially bringing a new mass of users that will contribute very little to the website

are close to being provocative. It does give a feeling that he is not happy to have his own blog, but feels like he needs to control every possible conversation channel.

I'm not suggesting censoring it for anything in particular that he writes about, but because the articles are always such deliberate linkbait. In 99% of his articles, the most interesting thing is the title. But I don't want PG and the editors to be accused of censorship, so I thought I'd ask for opinions first.
Yes, ban it; I'm tired of seeing Codinghorror stories on News.YC.
No, don't ban it; I like seeing Codinghorror stories on News.YC.
The only thing I can think of is that he wants to dilute the HN community with his own.

A brilliant yet terrifying insight.
Twitter: Please carry on suspending accounts like this.
If I was in the latter situation, I wouldn't be sitting around on Hacker News poking fun at pot heads. So, how are those braces working out for you? ;-)
Funny, my first test was also a pic of RMS.
I agree, but in practice I feel annoyed by my typos, and not being able to type directly what I think. It's a nice feeling of skill, to dance across the keyboard, with a seamless brain-computer connection. Like playing a video game.

I've tried to learn touch-typing a few times, but it makes my hands sore in a worrying way.

Another resolution is typing more slowly, and not caring so much about typos, since it doesn't really matter.
That reminds me of the reasoning behind wanting faster processors in our personal computers. From one (mistaken) perspective, you could argue that there is no justification for buying a faster processor because it will just be idle for more than 97% of the time you use it. The better argument is that we are justified in desiring a faster processor because the length of the CPU bursts is a much more important metric.
List Of Acquisitions By Google
Did you actually read the post? I said clearly it violated their TOS. So yeah, they did the right thing. That's why I wrote an apology and asked to be reinstated. The point was there is something valuable in there, i.e. worth charging for, that they should accommodate.

And where is the spam line anyway. Is sending one unsolicited tweet, spam? What about 5? What about one a day? Certainly all follows are not two way, so in some sense, a large portion of tweet replies are unsolicited. Is any tweet reply where the person is not following you, spam?

My suggestion was that they keep so-called paid tweets completely separate. So if you never want to see them, you don't have to. But if you want to see them, they are one-click away.
The benefits of knowing your tools extend even beyond your personal productivity. Such knowledge often presents opportunities to save the hides of other individuals.

For instance, I'm in a very, very large company (anyone in law, science, or journalism has used our products). I recently saw three separate requests for ~80 hours and $7000 of contractor time each to manually add serialVersionUIDs to serializable Java classes.

Eclipse, which we're paying* IBM to use, has a nice code refactoring tool that makes the entire process three clicks and about 30 minutes of twiddling your thumbs. I saved one and a half months of FTE time, and $20,000 by simply knowing what the tools we were already paying for could do.

*Yes, I'm aware that Eclipse is Free Software; we're using IBM's rebranded Rational Application Developer. Yes, I'd rather use Eclipse and Tomcat instead of RAD and WAS. No, I'm not bitter.
I have a few comments for you guys about our demo:

1. Image to Image is a bit misleading because we are fairly strict in our online demo in pose requirements, so many faces are "non-suitable" because they aren't frontal.

2. It works much better for video settings (but that type of online demo is way too CPU intensive) because we can organize each person into continuous tracks and we only need them to become 'frontal' once to do matching. And the more they are frontal, the more data points we have.

Here's an example of recognition applied to video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jsjf3IDXef8
SXSW attendance up, but so are "can't afford it" tweets
A good hacker can drive in 1000 nails with one blow.
I'm suggesting that codinghorror should take the same road that valleywag did: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=510309
IMMINENT DEATH OF MICROSOFT PREDICTED.

Erm, no. IE will live on and bring with it a raft of stuff -- like Silverlight -- we'll need in order to explore the Microsoft Internet.
Glibc's strlen implementation: Probably not what you'd guess
Web Directory Of Attorneys Upsets D.C. Bar
Sorry, we are experiencing a large volume of submissions.
There are 1 images ahead of you.
You can try refreshing this page later, or resubmit the same image to see the results.
And Friis is Danish. And the development of Skype mainly took place in Estonia AFAIK.
BASE scales better than ACID
Sometimes there's a local minimum, where you really need to rethink the whole chunk you're working with to come up with a better design. If you're in this situation, which you can get to gradually, there's might be no easy way to refactor a piece at a time. But this isn't (ever in my experience, at least) because a super-length function is really the best solution, but because the design wasn't great in the first place.
There is also a very good architectural argument that old cities make for better quality of life. If you're Houston or LA, you're built for cars. That makes for a worse experience than subways and walkways. The public parks in Boston are excellent. The Minute Man bike trail is unrivaled, as far as I'm concerned.

There is a great feedback loop here too. People that like things like the Public Garden are more likely to demand changes keep the feeling.

Even the Big Dig, while a bullshit waste of public resources, turns out to make the city much more pedestrian friendly. It largely emerged because the city was too old to retrofit a freeway system that could handle the capacity above ground.
Imagine you visit a website, where both links and non-links are shown by underlined black text. You quickly get confused by what you can and can't click on until you rollover them. I think we can both agree this is a bad thing, and that the correct fix for this is to make the links a different colour so it's obvious.

Imagine you're a new user visiting Stack Overflow, when things you both can and cannot use are shown in exactly the same way as a full user until you click on it and then it tells you that you need X karma to do something. I think this is a bad thing and that the correct fix is to either hide the things you can't do (because features I can't use don't really matter to me) or to make those things look different. This is where we differ, because you think it's not a bug, it's a feature, because it's a "small barrier" by confusing new users as to what they can do out of the box. I personally think that's /insane/, much like someone who decides to make all their links black as a "small barrier to new users".

I think you also misunderstood what I meant by "reduce the arbitrary karma limits". I don't necessarily mean "make them easier to attain" (although I'd argue reducing barriers to entry unless you have a good reason as it generally encourages new users), but rather "reduce how many of them there are". There are 10 different 'levels' of karma where features are unlocked to /users/. Why does a user need 15 to upvote but 100 to downvote? Why do you need 500 karma to retag questions but 750 to edit community Wiki posts? Most sites have a maximum of 3 levels of hierarchy (Admin, Moderator and User), your site has /at least/ 11. I guess with the badges system I should be happy that it doesn't use the same ridiculous system as Team Fortress 2.

And no, I wouldn't regard HN as good at usability either. Functional rather than ideal, even if it is trying to make creating a new poll difficult.
I suspect that largely depends on the subject.

I focus when I'm under pressure. For me, MJ would remove all that pressure, so I couldn't care less about code.

Different people, different results.
If you hate to be a prude, you can stop.

If you hate to be the prude (the only prude), well, I think you might as well get used to the hating.