skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: How useful is Pair Programming?
How useful and practical really is Pair Programming? Does it really work and scale up well?

What are the advantages and disadvantages? Statistical data/study would help.
Samsung has become aggressive in their viral ads.
I thought Intel invented the micro-op architecture with the Pentium Pro.
I didn't get involved in Street culture either. Looking back, I don't see how I could have fit into it at the time. Nevertheless, the ordeal of bickering at an eating club probably would have been a good experience to have under my belt.
I would be willing to bet that there is some correlation between a student's performance on the SAT and their ability to complete college-level coursework. After all, it is not mandatory that colleges accept it, and most seem to think it is worth their while.

Do you think the difference between an 800 and a 1400 student is "meaningless"?
CSRF exploit. If you know the username of the logged in user, you can have them vote up any story since the URL just takes the username of the voter. To my knowledge, that exploit still exists.
Very pretty and the article is to the point. No Firefox support and IE requires some "workaround".
It's interesting that customers like it. I started working on something like that, but the thought of being on the receiving end of constant advertising through my phone as I walked around really bugged me so I dropped the idea.

An explicitly opt-in version I could go along with, but the legwork to acquire advertisers was more than I wanted to do.
I'd love to see sub and renewal data like this for "indie" or small shops making an MMO or other on-going, recurring revenue games.
Why not just build a front end for craigslist? (organize the real-estate data rather than text-based search)...
People need to learn that the first bike you get should be <50 hp, and cheap enough you don't care when you drop it. Do not start with a Ducati.

That said, the 696 isn't THAT fast...
I'm pretty sure the CL TOS doesn't allow stuff like that.
There's both sides of pair programming... recently I attended a presentation where the presenter basically said that pair programming should be mandatory... on the other hand, I've done pair (and even triplet) programming... Here's my thoughts:

* Advantages
- Works great in initiating a new team member in to a large project
- Gives each developer a chance to do code-review on the fly
- If there's good rapport, pair programming can get a lot more done

* Issues
- Requires good co-ordination between team members
- Two similar thinking people may not be able to take full advantage of this technique
Apple Rejects Free iPhone Tool For Artists Because of “Minimal User Functionality”
I will add, and have repeated it to the offending indivual many times over the years. When speaking to reporters, do not use the phrase "coding in their underwear" when describing your amazing employee retention rate. It will show up in the article and then the whole "shared corporate underwear" question comes up.
I dunno about Detroit, but if anybody wants to join me in my move to Richmond, Indiana, I just bought a 4-bedroom house for $8000 there (cf. http://www.vivtek.com/blog/keyword_house.html). Closing next week, paying cash, and it still has its wiring, and a three-year-old roof.
Worth noting - There's a related service at http://browsershots.org/ where you can see how a webpage renders in a number of different OS & browser configurations. It's been very handy for me to make sure my designed-in-linux pages still looked decent to Mac/Windows users.
List of GSoC 2009 mentoring projects
Realtor.com is the best place to start. Not everything gets onto the MLS systems, but most of it does eventually. Prepare to be amazed.
WS/SOAP is self-documenting and can have client-side code fully auto-generated in a 100% reliable manner. REST, as it is not even near a documented standard besides "use HTTP verbs" not so much.

With the right toolkit WS/SOAP is basically automated on the server and client-side with no work involved.

Until REST gets there, enterprise applications and developers will still prefer WS/SOAP en-masse simply due to tool support.
Interesting points. It sounds like Michael and Issy have a lot going for them, and that they have a hard-to-find constellation of virtues, traits, and skills. It is that constellation that has brought about the atmosphere of trust, general goodness, and business success to the Four Seasons. It is the boss's aura that propagates to all levels of the organization, trust being but one matter.

The key to success is in people, starting with the person at the top of the pyramid. A bad boss cannot formulate success by inverting his personality or by adopting a daily "secrets to success" checklist to fervently abide by because he will fail eventually. That is a guarantee.

So if you want to be successful, you have to be good and hire good people. And if you can't hire good people it is probably because good people are hard to find (and probably expensive). That is why success is hard to achieve.

To push it one step further, an organization with lots of (or some) not-so-good people will not achieve trust, at least not to the fullest extent. A slacker causes other people to become embittered because they have to compensate. Slackers are not trusted. Gossipers are not trusted. Liars are not trusted. Greedy bosses are not trusted. Greedy bosses do not trust.
Jesus, I don't expect groupthink from HN.

Be rational. Most users use IE on Windows. Even if you don't like it, that's the way it is. Adobe Reader 9 loading in IE can crash the browser. Don't believe me? Google "IE loading PDFs" and you'll see the huge number of users who have problems.

Flash is reasonably reliable in IE. Additionally, Scribd has the option of embedding ads in the PDF more easily by using the player, which gives them a path toward monetization.

When creating a business, you have to be realistic. This is not a techno-utopia where the best technology always wins. In the browser wars, IE is still the current leader. You have to live with it if you want to maximize profit.
Digg/Reddit used to be civilized and intelligent as well, but then they grew in popularity and everything went downhill from there. It is definitely possible for the same thing to happen to HN if something (I have no idea what) isn't actively done to prevent it.
Ask HN - Check out my startup - Fuzr (for Feeds)
Fuzr is working to organize and unify the "feed". We've put together a website with the goal of helping people better manage and categorize their feeds. We've also got the goal of making the feed a mainstream concept where any "average" user can make a few clicks and start following feeds with information useful to them.

It's still in the rough stages (beta, I guess) where the final touches aren't on yet, and I welcome your (yinz? yall?) feedback and criticism to shape and smooth out the concept.

http://www.fuzr.com

edit: You'll soon be able to add/categorize your favorite feeds. Same goes for posting pics/video.
Link: http://www.fuzr.com
The fact is that very few studies have actually been done so most of what you get are anecdotal accounts.
I think pair programming has it's uses, for example, when a developer is stuck on a problem and can't move forward it's often helpful to have another set of eyeballs, but I have yet to see it effectively used full time (except for consultants who get to bill out at a double rate!).

A good book to check out with some counter arguments to pair programming and XP in general is "Extreme Programming Refactored: The Case Against XP".
Yeah - although microcode had been around for a very long time.

The difference between microcode and RISC was the amount of synchronisation - RISC generally implied lots of uniform, high performance operations. Microcode could, but didn't necessarily. e.g. Microcode could still be doing funky co-ordination with lots of specialised execution units (and did afaik). This has some similarities to RISC, but RISC is a different philosophy really - namely fewer types, pipelined accesses, uniform instructions, more registers, etc.

(In my view) the big watershed moment was AMD's K5 architecture. This was literally based on one of AMD's pure RISC designs. It wasn't that popular in itself, but it set up a golden age for AMD... Which really only came to an end with Intel's Core.
Agreed. I'd probably reverse Hexstream's comment in that I find it much harder to think up good ideas than actually implementing them.

It just never would have occurred to me to use Emacs as a video editor (my brain has been conditioned to think of it strictly as a text editor). If that idea had popped in my head then implementing it, relatively speaking, would probably have been less of a challenge than coming up with the actual idea in the first place which requires overcoming my preconceived notions.

In this instance, the idea is far more impressive than the actual code. This demonstrates innovation beyond technical prowess because it added a new way of doing something to a familiar software tool that most people would never have thought of.
Fire the AIG management
I hope their client doesn't resemble vmware's ungodly AJAX management interface. Sysadmins want simple, scriptable command line tools, not web apps.
Moonshine: A Puppet and Capistrano based configuration management tool for Rails
Studying the female form: Math could lead to sexier lingerie, safer labcoats
Facebook vs Google
Does anyone here actually believe that the NSA would pay billions to crack the protocol for an app that runs primarily on Windows machines?
Why the Meltdown Should Have Surprised No One
I think this is mostly because wundrbar has similar functions as the new SpotLight in iPhone OS 3.0.
For the Spanish, specifically: When (years ago) learning German and French, I found some popular music that I rather liked and listened to it a lot. This gave me a better feel for listening to the language. Since I enjoyed the music (and what I could understand of the lyrics, with added bursts of excitement when I figured out something new about them), this practice was itself a pleasure and it was not difficult to engage in. (It helped that I had friends who could provide a bit of context regarding the music as well as some recommendations.)

More recently, studies have elucidated that a lot of language acquisition occurs before/below the level of words and semantics. Infants first acquire language sound recognition and reproduction, for example. Also, different languages use/emphasis somewhat different frequencies in their speech. Extended listening to the language helps train the brain to focus on / stop filtering out those frequencies.

More generally, I find that you have to enjoy the process of learning. If you are simply aiming for some eventual goal, and view the process of getting there as a necessary misery, you are setting yourself up for failure.

Perhaps this is a bit sideways, but in some ways the Japanese film "Shall We Dance" may illustrate this. It's a wonderful film about a salaryman who falls sideways into ballroom dancing. A semi-fantasy about meeting an enigmatic woman in the window of a dance studio leads to an unexpected but personally enriching and empowering love of dance and the community it fosters.

(Be sure to watch the original Japanese version. The U.S. remake is a commercial gimmick that does disservice to the original film.)

I think we can (better) learn new things when we can enjoy them. If we think we have to learn them (completely) before we can enjoy them, that is sort of putting the cart before the horse. Of course, this is a generalization, and some things are difficult particularly at the start. But often there is still pleasure in there somewhere, long before one achieves mastery.

P.S. I know my more general "insight" here is hardly revelatory. But I find it a trap I have a tendency to keep repeating, myself, looking at the goal while neglecting making sure I'm enjoying the process. And if I'm enjoying the process, I tend to be more open to unexpected opportunities, e.g. the person who is happy to let me exercise my fledgling French even though they are fluent in English.
Actually, Dan Goodin at The Reg is a really credible industry reporter, who really does do actual reporting. This runs under someone else's byline, though.

There's no actual publication (outside of academia) that is good on crypto.
It sounds like a fun idea.

I wonder how much it'd cost to build a giant glass dome on your block. Properly designed it seems like you could have SoCal weather in your dome year round, with some security and ability to have interesting house designs to boot.

Edit: To answer my own question with some googling, rough cost estimates of building a giant greenhouse are about $8 per square foot... (using polyethylene, not glass). So to cover a city block, with a 20 foot setback, would cost about $1 million... I guess I might have to scale back that plan a bit.
Chrome Extension How To ‎(Chromium Developer Documentation)‎
Microcode is an implementation technique. Micro-ops (or whatever Intel formally calls them) is an instruction dispatch architecture --- an actual microarchitectural feature.

Just to be pedantic.
Yeah - I'd agree in general. However, I'd argue that SOAP isn't really there yet either - it's more progressed, but issues such as versioning and lifecycle management aren't something many orgs really have a handle on yet.

So I guess my query is - How will these orgs feel about Sun moving to REST when they are still investing/maturing a SOA based on SOAP?
I don't mean to be stuffy, but I don't think HN articles should have titles like "Funniest x ever", for any value of x.

Maybe we should bring back Erlang week?
economic 15th-percentile

What do you mean by "economic 15th-percentile" (mentioned in more than one of your replies) in this context? What income level?

http://www.census.gov/Press-Release/www/releases/archives/in...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United_...
Credit card skimming malware targeting Diebold ATMs
I'd move to ruby but the OO's a bit limited for my tastes - no multiple inheritance and a fairly minimalist mixin system just doesn't cut it after doing perl/python OO and using assorted lisps for prototyping.

Of course, every ruby dev I've spoken to about this has basically said "you don't need anything more, and if you do want it, that means your design is wrong" - which brings us immediately into a question of opinion so I can't really argue either way about it.

I do find perl5 v10 w/MooseX::Declare to be very much "ruby, but with a more flexible object system" though ...
New YC Startup: Adioso ("casual travel")
"The main Trojan executable contains the code to handle the magnetic card reader using undocumented Diebold Agilis 91x functions, inject code to ATM’s processes, parse transactions in Ukrainian, Russian and US currencies and use printer, probably for printing the stolen data. I am also fairly sure that some of the instructions to the keyboard for typing PIN numbers are connected with hooks to log the captured PINs."

And

"By uncovering code that appears to encrypt data and a possible alternative user interface it seems to me that the stolen data is encrypted, probably to allow the attackers to use “money mules” to retrieve the data in person."

Just wow.

ZeroDay has more on this http://blogs.zdnet.com/security/?p=2908
> degrade the user experience upon which they all depend... I find it hard to believe.

Try this on for size:

http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2008/11/apple-brings-hdcp-...
> I've never been one for help/bundles/snippets/macros/etc

And you bought TextMate because... it's cool? I seriously don't understand, why you would buy TextMate, if you don't like using the very things that make it great.
This is random and unrelated to your (excellent) comment, but I recognize the building in the banner graphic on College Consultant Reviews as the Wren Building at William and Mary.
Then there are guys like me who submitted his iPhone app info-mercial article at midnight on Valentine's day. Fail.
The two types of reseller
Not sure about this. I am currently building stuff on Amazon and only use the REST interface. Even when it comes to needing my own Java API, converting to Java to XML isn't a big deal anymore.

It would be good to see the proportion of SOAP/REST usage there. WS/SOAP is good but in the beginning when a lot of innovation is going on there will be some flux and supporting both would be costly.
That's bizarre, considering Skype already has built-in hooks for the police force to use
Tony Hsieh's (Zappos CEO) SXSW '09 Presentation
Livetwittering of YC demo day going on now
why did you delete your old post? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=521753
$18-30k works, which would be about 15th-percentile once students, pensioners, and part-time workers are taken out. I'm talking about the level at which a person is definitely poor, but not in abject poverty. In upstate New York, that level of income wouldn't make a person impoverished.
It'd be nice if we could use the correct terms for these things. I know that I'm probably picking nits, but there's a difference between extensions and plugins.

My simplified definition: plugins run native code, extensions run Javascript. Flash if a plugin, Firebug in an extension.
The C-based way of handling things has been, for some time to write a low-level core in C and glue things together with a "scripting" language that's written in C and provides good C interoperability.

The Lisp way, which seems to be getting more popular (e.g. PyPy, Clojure) is to be high-level by default, but allow type annotations, unchecked math and such low-level things to optimize code where the profiler tells you there are problems. I think this way is objectively better, if only because the profiler has more information at runtime than the programmer does while coding.
Adding to the urban ledgend i've heard so many times: "google is the NSA" :)
Was it mentioned that this was his first bike ?!
? _macbook pro on par with similar offerings?_ which ones?, not the Lenovo's Dell's or Sony's IMHO
I posted it early in the morning for PST and then realized that most people on this site seem to be on the West Coast. So I decided to delete it and repost later in the day. Figured it would be more visible that way?
Heise reported last year that the Austrian police is able to listen in on Skype connections. Neither Austria nor Skype confirmed or denied the story back then.

http://www.heise.de/english/newsticker/news/113353
I haven't worked on Cardinal in ages, besides moving it to an independent repository recently and updating it to actually build on its own last night.

The grammar is fairly complete, but the standard library isn't there, several builtin classes are missing completely, or don't have all their methods filled out, etc.

I was targeting 1.9, yes.

The big problem is that I don't actually know or really like ruby. That's the main reason I stopped working on it.

I'd love to see someone else take up work on it. I'd be glad to give commit privs on the repo to anyone, and I'd love to help anyone get up to speed in working on it.
I only visited Princeton after I was admitted. I applied blind.

When did you apply?

It must have been in the '80s or '90s, because these days it's pretty much impossible to get into the Ivies without a campus visit on record (or two, preferably). The assumption is that anyone who hasn't done a visit or do doesn't have enough enthusiasm to attend.
search twitter for #YC for more updates
Push and Pull Databases To and From Heroku
They don't need to break it, Skype already offers backdoor access for governments.
One of the things I was looking forward to in implementing Ruby on Parrot was using real OO. I don't really mind ruby's syntax too much, but the OO was frustrating.
Uh, wow, that house is huge. What is the town and neighborhood like? This is crazy...
The whole point of AdBlock is that it does block the actualy requests in the first place. Why should I have to download 800k of ads for a 200k webpage, and open myself to adware tracking cookies? Removing them from DOM after they've been downloaded is not a proper solution to me at all...
I hard-coded that limit because I use some short usernames internally... But I also figured that because GMail has a limit of 6 characters that I probably wasn't going wrong anyway limiting people to 5 characters.

Do you think I should decrease the limitation on that?

Thanks for checking it out!
I was blown away listening to Tony talk about their customer service principles. They don't hide behind email support systems or obnoxious phone switch boards. The telephone is the central nervous system of their customer support efforts, and it's handled by real people here in the states.

I think too many companies are more worried about their bottom line, than the long-tail benefits of premium customer service and what it means for sustainability and growth.

It was also interesting to note what ALL new hires much go through before acting on their core job duties. It's a 5 week process that includes everything from taking orders to intern-level work. Even the executives must spend 2 weeks in their TN warehouse doing low-level packaging and shipping.
http://www.w3.org/TR/xbl/

Check out the editor of XBL - for those not familiar, XBL is what XUL is built on top of as well as all the widgets you see in the mozilla platform (ff/tb etc), including all your html controls. I think if google went this route, they are definitely picking up where netscape left off and where moz foundation has limped along with, ie. building a platform around the browser.
Call 10,000 people and give them each a coin. Ask them to toss it ten times.

Chances are one will get ten heads in a row.

This doesn't mean they have a secret you can learn, or that they can teach you how to flip ten heads in a row straight off, or that they can do it again or event that they can flip one more head.

We have a world where millions of businesses were started, some are very successful - most folded - that doesn't mean the successes have a secret you can copy to copy their success. Or even a non-secret.

I'm not saying business success is as random as tossing a coin, but self-selecting the successful companies to study is a very biased sample, and that doing what they do to get the results they get is not a guaranteed strategy.
Title should be, "10 Business Ideas for the 90's"
"Vendors do all sort of tricks to make their claims look good..."

Reminds me of: http://www.dilbert.com/2009-03-02/
A tech meetup in Pittsburgh that /isnt/ on a Thursday night? Shocking. :)
Are there any numbers that do comparisons with on price (i.e., above and below $1000)? Unit numbers are not so interesting. It's like trying to compare sales at Wal-Mart and Nordstrom.
And lots of lessons were learned, and taken to heart? (cough)
difference between digg/reddit and HN is that HN users typically actively police, and the application restricts functionality based on your karma. you're not allowed to do certain things unless you have a certain level of trust, which isn't the case on digg/reddit.
i just like to get the username "plc"
I've led agile teams for the past three years where there has always been some pairing and some solo work. I'm sorry I can't offer statistical data, only my anecdotal observations:

* Pairing is particularly useful when breaking new ground.

* Pairing is good for knowledge sharing.

* Pairing is good for quality.

* One pair is slower than two solo developers.

* Based on the last 3 years I don't buy the idea that long-term pace is higher because we'll have less technical debt due to pairing.

* Improved quality may not be worth the lower overall pace

* You hired professional developers - let them work the way they think is best or find new developers i.e. respect their preferences for pairing or going solo.
2000. Graduated in '04. Worked in admissions from 04-06.
this sounds like a diversion - it doesn't address what would seem to be a much larger problem of knowing which conversations are worth listening to. also wouldn't help establish the context of the conversation/decode its actual meaning.