skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I never had much use for the PMs at Microsoft. On the other hand, every PM I knew there had a... let's say "large" sense of their own worth. Guess it was in the job description. Since leaving I have encountered PM-like roles doing everything from just documenting whatever crazy requests the users made, to ignoring the users and pushing for whatever they personally wanted. Occaisionally I have encountered someone who really added to the process, but it takes just the right person, and sadly that's been the exception rather than the rule.
I'm interested to how cardboard can support a person (there are what appears to be cardboard steps in there). Is there something special (like some pyramids) going on inside the step? That cardboard table looks impressive though.
I can see that - it's like musicians that don't rate musicians who can't play piano.

But - I guess I've seen a few counter-examples in coding - e.g. I used to know a mainframe guy who had arthritic pain. He coded very slowly indeed, but it flowed out of him flawlessly.... So I tend not to have that bias.

If I met someone who wanted to get into programming, I certainly wouldn't say "practice your typing" - I'd say, "read these books".
He is still writing :-) But it's based on an actual book that he wrote two years ago. It was pretty successful for its niche, but since it was in Danish (population 5 million) he never made much money because the native market is so small. So the idea is to spiff it up, translate it to English and sell it as an e-book.
One of my early mentors taught me that "it's not how fast you type but what you type" that matters.

I think his lengthy career as a journalist, designer, photographer, M$ engineer, Apple engineer and Google Engineer have proven him correct.

The analogy with understanding/familiarity with your tools is weak. The only important tool for an engineer is his brain.

(PS I abhor the term hacker)
Well, it's more "Core competencies of hackers in the C/C++/UNIX/Scripting/Web tradition."

Most of the great Windows hackers I know use Visual Studio. Most of the great Java hackers use IntelliJ. Of course, people in the UNIX/web tradition would probably not admit that great hackers exist in those cultures, but they've put out some pretty impressive software...

Also - I suspect that great UNIX/web hackers don't use IDEs because the IDEs for those languages suck. I work on a C++ web team. If you glance around our monitors, everyone has the same setup: 4-6 terminals, 3-5 emacs/vim windows open, and Firefox. The funny thing is, many of us are ex-Java programmers, and we all used either IntelliJ or Eclipse in our Java programming days. And would love to use something like IntelliJ for C++, but we took one look at the C++ support in Eclipse and ran back to vim.
4 Core Competencies Of a Great Hacker
You're being marginalized. But I'm not sure if you're capable of being VPE but are being passed over because the CEO wants to bring in a buddy or because you are genuinely extremely unsuited for the job.

If you don't want to be marginalized, fight to get the VPE position. If you're going to get fired or further marginalized for fighting, you might as well learn now so that you'll win next time. If you get VPE, learn the skills required to be a great VPE and prove him wrong. Ask point blank for the position and find out why the CEO thinks you're unsuitable for VPE.

For some reason suits think management is not learnable/teachable. You sound smart; it's quite possible you'll be able to learn the required skills.

IMHO, people who think management is about "people skills" and "politics" are the clueless ones. Read up "High Output Management" by Andy Grove, a hard-core geek if ever there was one. He turned out to be an amazing manager too. Bill Gates, even harder-core nerd also turned out be an amazing manager.

To my mind, management is more similar to programming than to party planning (where people skills are really required). The manager's job is to set up systems and processes which will result in maximum output. To do this, you need to be analytical, quantitative, data-driven, open to being proven wrong etc. Do you see how you've been practicing all of these skills as a techie? Do the same for a proper manager's job skills and you'll see the overlap.

As an aside, I think all managers should have some individual responsibility also. Otherwise they will be tempted to create problems that can be 'solved' to justify their existence.

Re: "politics is not your strong suit" comments: you're expect things to work rationally but they seem to be irrational. Being techie who's always open to the possibility that you might be wrong, you're getting a second opinion to check your conclusions. Nothing wrong with that; that's a strength.
Yauba: a search engine that logs nothing
Alternate interpretation:

"I'm hoping to goad Apple into action by focusing some public attention on them."

It might even work, if he posts it on a blog somewhere with proper formatting. Even "Content-type: text/html" would make the letter a lot more readable.
Schizophrenia is only a risk if you start smoking dope at an early age, before your brain is fully developed, and this is true not only for marijuana but also for pretty much all psychoactive drugs (Ritaline, anyone?). Consuming psychoactive substances at an early age is never a good idea.

For the record, schizophrenia has never been associated to people who started smoking marijuana /after/ adolescence, and it has even show therapeutic properties for a number of brain disorders, such as Alzheimer's.

I should add that unfortunately many youngsters and adolescents smoke pot and that should absolutely not happen, the same way alcohol and cigarettes are prohibited for people under 18/21.
Is the goal to ensure that every major browser turns on an ad-blocker by default?

Seriously, these things are going too far. I guarantee people aren't going to click through more often, but they are going to be more annoyed.

I wish websites would just charge me money for their content. It is much easier for everyone.
This depends a great deal on the language used.

Breaking a large function apart into several smaller pieces makes testing them easier, and (even more importantly) lets one name them. A well-named function is generally better than a block of code in a function with a one-line comment before it, IMHO. (Of course, there's nothing stopping you from giving all of functions names like doThatStuff() besides the eternal scorn of your peers.)

It can be annoying in languages that require a lot of type annotations just to declare a function and have poor support for nested functions, though.
Because I don't think typing is the most basic tool - It's abstract thought.
Could that be because you exclude Windows hackers from your definition of "hacker"?

I know some folks on the Google Toolbar team. I don't use Toolbar, and neither do any of my friends. It's desktop software, and desktop software for Windows, so I mostly ignore it.

But their installed base is huge. I'd wager that if you added up the combined user base of every Web2.0 startup mentioned on this site, you still wouldn't equal the number of Google Toolbar users worldwide. Are they still hackers?

FWIW, they use Visual Studio.
> Sounds impressive until you remember that 55,000 children drown in backyard swimming pools every year.

Where? Not in the US - the total number of drownings (including adults and other bodies of water) is under 4k/year.

http://www.cdc.gov/HomeandRecreationalSafety/Water-Safety/wa...

I agree with the sentiment expressed - I'm just quibbling with the numbers used to support it.
Marketing to Hispanics
I'm a big fan of Mike Rowe, and it looks like he's serious about the message he wants to spread. There's more at the site he's starting (started):

http://www.mikeroweworks.com/
If the author wants to put public pressure on Apple he'll develop an Android version of the app, and a Symbian version, and a Palm Pre version, and whatever else. Until then, he's all mouth and trousers.
These things aren't really enough. They're more of "things you need to know be a computer hobbyist". I did put together a quick list once -- for an HN post asking what should someone learn as undergrad if they wish to be a web developer -- of things I'd prefer a back-end developer that I would hire to know:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=499880

Of course, knowing these things (or really, knowing anything) doesn't make you a hacker quite yet, it's a title one earns within a community by contributing to it. As cliche as it is, "how to become a hacker" covers this part:

http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html#status
Maybe he should stop and sharpen his saw...
> Charging for your products, on the other hand, is a well-proven model that has worked for hundreds of years.

I think you vastly underestimate (by many orders of magnitude) the length of time businesses have been successfully charging money for their products.
i am annoyed by the title
The article was pointing out correlations, nothing more.
What other things do you do regularly? Write emails, specs, contracts, documentation?

Of course you probably also do other stuff than typing on a keyboard. It's just that the keyboard often is the most efficient interface between you and your main tool, your computer.

I think typing speed is a good competency to improve to be more efficient in the next few decades.
I did actually mean look at it periodically for a while and check out some of the sites that come up. You can't really take a single snapshot for a single day and draw any conclusion from it.

That's like saying there haven't been any IPO's today, so IPO's aren't possible.

Also it's probably slightly rarer to see profitable ad-supported websites actually come up for sale, since often they take nothing to run, so people hang onto them.
Now Cringely Thinks Neokast Is Dead
I probably wouldn't tell somebody to go practice typing either, but that's not because it isn't important. I would just take it for granted that they could already type.
If you're getting 3ms memcached access then you must be using a different app engine than I am.

And it's 100ms reads not writes. Writes are slower. Much slower.
There are at least two people who I'd dub "great hackers" who type essentially, two fingered. One of them suffers from horrible RSI (but, at one point, had the company hire someone to be their hands).

The other didn't grow up around computers/type writers (growing up in the 1940s/1950s in Soviet Union), didn't really heavily program until after graduate school and for the first decade mostly programmed by writing code on paper and having it punched onto cards.
> First, what is "one thing"?

You're the author, dude! What you choose as the "one thing" of any given method gives me, the reader, information. You can emphasize an activity by breaking it out into a method, or de-emphasize it by leaving it inline.

There's no evidence that Poe was a great short story writer either. You have communicative power with your choices; use it consistently and wisely.
To answer your first question, the right size of the method is that which a typcial maintainer of the code has no problems holding within his head.

The "one thing" is a one-statement decription of the method such that the maintaner does not need to look inside the second go around undersand the place where it is being invoked.

As to your second question, I have no answer. It is a bunch of voodoo right now and I have to wonder which body could, even in theory, produce a scientificaly valid proof of efficiency (or lack thereof)?
While you bring up a great point, I think that loathing the guy and calling him a douchebag is a little extreme. It's not like the guy is killing puppies...

Anyways, his larger point is dead on - Apple's opaque and lengthy approval process adds unnecessary business risk for prospective developers.
Unit testing should provide a measure of protection against this kind of problem (side effects of changes). The actual experience of writing, updating, and running the tests adds its own complexity, though, so I'd view them as a big help, but not an easy to apply solution.
Long term trend. Status update is the #1 feature I/my network use on Facebook. I use things like "Notes" only because there's a char limit in status update.

And I use Facebook instead of Twitter only because most of my network uses FB and not twitter.

I'm unsure if Twitter itself will make it big, but twitter-style updates are going to be big.
> all my Lisp articles

Completely off topic (and I apologize to everyone else), but in viewing your profile to find all your Lisp articles, I noticed we are rocking the same top color... it is quite pretty.
Great point. I've seen that developers that really understand OO tend towards smaller, more encapsulated classes/methods w/o side-effects whereas developers with a procedural background tend towards longer 'void' methods that lump side-effects into one place.
Techcrunch loses Hendrickson
A Lisp interpreter written in Awk.
That's the best phrasing of Occam's Razor I've seen in a while.
I really hate to be the prude, but do we need titles like this on the front page?
Ask HN: What stocks are you invested in?
401K doesn't count
FanBridge Makes A Profit Connecting Fans, Band
Long term trend. It's useful in all kinds of ways, from kicking of discussions, near real-time alerts, tracking chatter on topics of interest, and other kinds of activities. Agree that while it might not be Twitter, the trend of lightweight messaging services is here to stay
It's never too early to apply to YC. That's the point of YC: it's first gear.
Techstars is running a program in Boston now. I know a few of the mentors and they are great folks involved.
You're comparing the magnitude of success for amber alerts - a solution to a problem, to the magnitude of problems themselves. It's not mere callousness, it's poor analysis.

Whether you want to think about it or not, child sexual abuse is no dead crime. It's alarmingly common. It effects at least 20% of those closest to me - and this only for cases that I know of. From national surveys of adults, (www.unh.edu/ccrc/factsheet/pdf/CSA-FS20.pdf) it's estimated that 9-32% of women and 5-10% of men were subject to sexual abuse during their childhoods (though statistics for criminal reported cases are much lower -- about 1.2
per 1,000 children).

Who is to say that were the law enforcement less vigilant, such abuse wouldn't escalate. In many countries, it does. Particularly in South-East Asia and Eastern Europe, the sex trade is rampant -- Unicef estimates put it at 1 million young sold into the trade per year (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/1707763.stm). The amber alert is but one deterrent; the combined effect is likely quite effective.

Who among those arguing for AMBER alerts are campaigning against charity programs to Africa? What instead we have are law enforcement agencies partnering up to work against child abductions and sexual abuse effectively.

Effectively? It is even, by many standards, economical. The economic loss of 27 children would almost certainly exceed the $30 million in funds nationally allocated to it. The biggest tax you pay is in attention, and even there you've already given to it in reaction more attention than it demands. Is there a school program, obesity program, or swimming pool program that would do the same?

There may be more immediately successful uses for said attention and funding abroad. But do those fighting child abductions and absurd donate less money and time to charitable concerns abroad. It is only my impression, but in my corner of the world apparently not. Those concerned with and directly involved in advancing social good are rarely concerned with just one part of it.

Do not, then, begrudge people of the interest in the safety of their children and community, of their charitable work, and of their fears. To do so is not only to deny to human nature some of the most powerful forces for good, but to deny the self-interest that drives our society, without which we would wither.
not really. Lots of people have shouted this..it was before RSS and blogging so the megaphone and recording devices were not on. I'm sure I'm not the only one. When Java started taking off with J2EE, I tried really hard to let the majors (Sun, IBM, Netscape, Microsoft, BEA) understand how their monolithic frameworks were not what most users needed.
It all fell on deaf ears to the tune of: "What, EJBs are too complex? Swing shouldn't bypass native UI controls?" This not just from the architects inside those big co's, but from the users that would believe anything a big co told them.
It took a full decade of users to experience how poorly conceived these frameworks were before DHH had a stage to stand on.

Timing is everything. Users had to go through this severe disillusionment before anything like Rails could have every been accepted. If it wasn't DHH, it would have been someone else. Its the message and timing of it, not the messenger that is generally more important.

Also, do not get me wrong. I'm actually not a Rails fan nor a serious opponent of it, use what works for you. Rails only gets half the equation right in my opinion. Rails too severally bastardizes MVC and lacks quality internals (hopefully Rails 3 will change some of this). What Rails does right is the accessibility of its APIs/DSLs, convention over configuration, etc...btw, all been done before the dark cloud of Java rolled onto the scene.
Just goes to show how starved the web dev world was to flock to only half a solution. Turns out this was exactly the half of the equation they were starved for.
Thanks, I was hoping people would add to that list - and certainly wasn't claiming that covering those 4 skills would make you a hacker.
Some of us read on screens that have thousands of pixels horizontally. More than 80 characters on a line is just bad form.
Only as far as the carpenter's is knowing where the nail goes.
Actually, I'd say 'read these books' and 'learn to type'. Half of development is communication - writing emails, comments, docs, whatever. Why wouldn't one benefit from entering text more quickly?

Anyways, there are probably a subset of slow typists that are good programmers. But I'd be surprised if they weren't the exception.
Well, I grew up in Vermont, so I may be crazy, but I have a garage, good boots, and a love for snowboarding, walking in the snow, fireplaces, hot tea, and all that. I don't have to dig my car out of the snow, I don't slip on the ice, and I don't mind the dark days at all.

I love the sense of history that Boston has, old churches and many places that played a big role during the American Revolution. For me, it's the perfect US city, with the right balance of culture, East Coast attitudes, weather, etc... But I totally understand that it's not for everyone:)

With regards to the tech hub thing, I definitely see lots of younger tech people flocking to SV due to all the VC, Google, etc... That said, if you ignore the VC driven profitless startups, Boston still has a decent share of tech companies, and lots of other business (financial, medical, pharama/gene/biotech, etc..) which I think is important for a standard business ecosystem.
I could never read codinghorror again after reading this article http://blog.wekeroad.com/blog/nothing-to-say
Do you actually need VC based funding? If so, maybe you should move.

If you can self-fund, bootstrap, or get funding from some individuals, then Boston is fine. There are lots of very good business and technical folks, mentors, and lots of individual wealth.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=510087
is there a video of the talk up somewhere?
Hm. I distinctly remember that number from a talk but I can't find a reference. The closest I found is this:

http://www.lifesaving.com/issues/articles/13swimming_pool_dr...

.. which has the high number but is hard to interpret and doesn't cite its own sources. It does sound surprisingly high, though, I'll change my comment to "thousands", which I hope you'll agree is "safe".
In Firefox, View Source -> View -> Wrap Long Lines. Still 3 annoying steps, but its better than 5.
Formula 1 user interfaces
The Office Made of Cardboard
The correct size for functions is as short as possible without adding unneeded complexity, and no shorter. A piece of code deserves to be a function if you can coherently explain what it does using only terminology from the problem domain, or if having it significantly simplifies other code. Otherwise, leave it inline.
You break complex tasks in simpler tasks:

- Go To School

- Shower

- Get wet

- Clean

- Rinse

- Get Dressed.

- Have breakfast

- Prepare food

- Eat

So different tasks have a different level of detail. The advantage is that you end up with more reusable methods. Like "shower" or "Prepare food" that can be used elseware.

In another time there used to be more emphasis on top-down design, but I feel that has been lost and I do not know if it is still taught.
The thing I love about Mike Rowe is that he's been to hundreds of 'dirty' jobs and has come out with a converse theory on nearly everything we've been told to believe.

We're told we should work as little as possible in a job thats as physically undemanding as possible and believe we should be paid more for it.

The best days work for me was when I had to knock down a wall. I had a 10 lb sledge hammer, a wall I'd wrongly presumed to be cinder block, but was in fact reinforced concrete blocks they used for bomb shelters in WW2. It took me about 6 hours to finally get the wall down and that night I slept like a baby and for like 3 days I don't think it was even physically possible to get annoyed.

I don't know why, but when I work with my hands I always seem to be in a much happier mood, and I think it helps that demolition is just downright stress relieving. IIRC there's a demolition company in the UK where you can pay them to let you rip down a part of an apartment or office building before they tear it down. Apparently they made a lot of money with the idea.
Show HN: Our new online face recognition demo
Spoken like a true non-parent. And yes you are a callous bastard too.
I used to feel this way, but then I discovered that the resident uber programmer at work is a two finger typist. He is brilliant; used to work at Xerox Parc and all that.
I meant copy and paste.

As you have discovered the problem is complex because of the explosion of compares if you try to do it in any general way. It would be useful to query "is there any other code like the section that I selected?" The copied code usually has changes in things like constants and argument. If you abstracted away constants it might be easier to compare. Just a suggestion.
The app is on hold because Apple's review team can't find the FART button.

It would do Apple a world of good to democratize the app review process. Let the reviewers and customers decide what is App Store-worthy.
Even walking on the esplanade on a serene calm winter's day when there's no-one else about can be very tranquil. Also, I find walking about Boston, even in weather that most people think of as bad, a good way to help me concentrate my thoughts.

Bad weather's not a big deal, you just have to dress appropriately.
I am now a parent, and I still feel that way.

Worrying about unlikely threats and neglecting real threats does not make you holy. It is evil.

When lives are at stake, anything less than full rationality is costing lives, and no amount of irrational kvetching or socially-approved attacks trying to convince people to stop worrying about reality and instead worry about fiction can change that.

You may not be callous, but aren't you the true "bastard" here?
http://searchyc.com/SXSW

(I just thought of a new startup idea: letmesearchycthatforyou.)
Live Dance Performance and Fictional Twitter Mashup
3 out of 5 of those projects mentioned involve Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis - so it perhaps isn't so much Sweden as a small group of people...