skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In fact, one can argue that the one paradigm (or, the one philosophy) to rule them all is known. It is the UNIX way of doing things: have a lot of simple, little programs reading a well-defined input on on an input pipe, producing a well-defined output on the output pipe. That way, each problem can be implemented in a language fitting the problem (read this: A language which can model the input data and the output format in the most natural way) and you will end up with a lot of simple programs, all well-readable and all very beautiful.

Of course, this has a first (minor) problem: You need to know multiple languages. However, I consider the "problem" of many people not knowing multiple languages a chicken-and-egg-problem. If you just know a single programing language and never learn a second one, you will not learn how to learn programming languages. If it becomes very natural to know many languages, learning a new language becomes very, very simple (I for myself found it to be a very good way to get a good grasp on the runtime model of the language.Once you know the runtime model of a language, actually programming it is easy).

However, the worse problem is: Grasping and actually designing things in the UNIX-way is hard. In fact, hard is not the right term. It is _different_ from the way such design was taught to me. I for myself recently massively restructured a (simple) code generator into many smaller programs, communicating via pipes. At first, this felt very akward, because.. it was different? However, now that I am implementing and using this, the new version does have massive benefits. (In fact, webservices appear to be the unix-philosophy in different clothes). So I guess it is just a problem with peoples minds.
One important factor is that naturally a lot of women die in childbirth, So a successful man in the past would often go through multiple wives.
Aren't these myths for all entrepreneurs, and not just women?
I'm very glad when this issue gets attention. The software patent system is severely broken.

There's something wrong when patents play a more important role as a defensive play (for most companies) than as an incentive for inventors to implement their ideas.

My own recommendation is that a company should lose its rights to a patent if there is not at least one product released by the company in x years.
Because saving the planet relies on all of us.

The power is YOURS.
Fascinating thoughts, though most of the points seem to be justified using anecdotes. I think many of these points should be encouraging to all entrepreneurs.

I also think the tech industry is missing out by not having more women participate.
Bigger companies can also "use it" easier than small companies. It would make patent sqatting more expensive, but probably not prohibitively so.
If you're heading off to google images to see how this compares to real and not overexposed cityscapes, then the below links will save you some time. Open the last picture up while you watch the video at 2:09, bottom left building.

http://media-cdn.tripadvisor.com/media/photo-s/01/12/00/de/t...
http://abodenyc.com/images/New%20York%20City%20Images/New-Yo...
http://edp.org/Travel/Chicago/ChicagoNight.jpg
http://www.flickr.com/photos/arjunpurky/2507602603/
http://www.picturecorrect.com/wallpaper/japan/tokyo_1024x768...
http://www.flickr.com/photos/yayatan/35736937/
http://www.postcardsfromhonshu.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/0...
http://www.markmyhsieh.com/Blog/files/page0_blog_entry78_15....
http://leejones-san.tripod.com/sitebuildercontent/sitebuilde...

Projects like these are great examples of hitting that 5% that gets you 95% of the way home. When he talks about avoiding simulations, that's precisely right. I wish he would talk more about how he's choosing the right things to focus on. Perhaps it's just luck? For example, I think that a few of his steps, like bloom, were detrimental. Irregular streets might have solved the streets problem by hiding them (cf. 1st pic). Brightening up buildings in the distance could also have made this look even better.
I'm afraid:

More power plants != lower carbon footprint
IsNSFW.com - The Safe For Work way to share Not Safe For Work links
I launched a new service yesterday and I'd like to get some feedback on it.

It's a URL shortener that allows you to safely share NSFW content with people. You create a URL, give it a rating, and the user has the option to follow.

Thoughts? Ideas? Rants and Raves?

Cheers
-eli
Time to recruit those interns: Graduating U.S. college seniors entering grim market
Looking for thoughts, feedback, rants, raves. The site is essentially a safe way to share not safe content. With URL shorteners becoming popular it's hard to know if what you're clicking on is safe to visit (especially at work).

isNSFW.com aims to fix that.

Cheers
-eli
Time to drop out.
I tend to push SQL fairly hard. As such I find that ORMs are in my way as often as they help. The lack of one doesn't concern me at all.

Seriously, how hard is it to compose a SQL query?
It's been done. A little over 8% of respondents were 40 or over.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=517039
I've traditionally used Foxmarks (now called Xmarks) for organization (it allows me to access my bookmarks when I'm in the computer lab at school, for example), and recently created a Delicious account because my.foxmarks is awful. I've found about 100 great links in the past few days just by checking out the collections of folks who share lots of my bookmarks. I hate that you can't view popular tag combinations (only recent or personal ones), but perhaps this will come.

I'd kill to have something that syncs my bookmarks, passwords and history, and also analyzes the data somehow. Mozilla Weave is on the right track as far as syncing history, but buggy for me. A Foxmarks/Weave/Google Web History/RescueTime combo, perhaps. With an Awesome Bar-like search UI and interesting analytics. And web-based so I can access this stuff from afar. I think an FF extension would be necessary to sync the data, but it'd be great if it could comb data even when I'm using IE in a computer lab [security issues abound, I know].
I'm one of those who is often critical of Atwood, and the point is not that he is "wrong sometimes", but rather, that a) he tends to carelessly dismiss those things he doesn't understand, and b) this includes much of the discipline of computer science.

As Dennis Forbes so aptly put it, "Be careful diving in [to CodingHorror] headfirst, though, as the technical depth is generally so shallow you'll be hitting the bottom before you've even broken through the surface tension."
Interesting. Are there any other articles about how popular these types of P2P networks still are? I thought the days of Limewire, Kazaa, Morpheus, etc were all over.
Really? Like when? When he blames Wikipedia for his misunderstanding of P=NP? When complains like a little school girl that it's not his fault he doesn't know what "begging the question" means? Is he that eager to learn when he constantly bemoans how pointless it is to learn C or know anything about how computers actually work, save for when he fawns over a select few Turing award winners for whom he doesn't even understand the work of? Maybe you're right.
There are a number of SQL libraries. http://hackage.haskell.org/packages/archive/pkg-list.html#ca...

The complaint was that there aren't any mature libraries that go a step further, beyond feeding manually-constructed query strings to the DB connection, preventing injection vulns at the type level, etc. In an OO language this would be an object-relational mapper. I think the functional crowd is still trying to figure out what a "functional-relational mapper" is supposed to look like.
How [Tech] Company Names Came About
I don't know if all of them are true, nevertheless it is quite interesting.
you might say they're pointless to have in an iPhone, but I think partly that's because an iPhone can't yet do them well.

I meant that you might say they're pointless for iPhone sales. It's not just for developers, but also for the products that are easier to create with them (if you had a database sitting there, extensive libraries etc). Imagine if you could use an iPhone as a desktop PC, in the same way that many people dock laptops dock into a display and keyboard, and it was powerful enough to run all the apps that most people use. I'm thinking of how the mainframe was replaced by the mini, by the workstation, by the PC...

But I didn't realize the size difference was quite so dramatic. The display of the smallest netbook is almost 50% larger than a whole iPhone in both directions.

netbook display 93 x 153
iPhone 62 x 115
The Leaderboard should exclude points from url submissions (does it do this already?).

Only upvotes on comments and non-url submissions should count.
I think this is the key point. Atwood is overly dismiss and has even written flat out anti-intellectual diatribes (see the "fireman" post).
More importantly, RIM has 3 of the top 5 spots.
This is one thing that I have never liked about my fellow programmers/developers.

They sit around and speculate and arrogantly pontificate to no end when all that's really needed is a direct question to a person who can provide a direct answer.

Just ask the fucking doctor if he really believes in homeopathy, and if he does, switch providers.
Passwords vs. Pass Phrases:
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000342.html

Easier on the user, harder for hackers: that's a total no-brainer. I've adopted passphrases across the board on all the systems I use.

I guess the anonymous person discovered his passphrase?
Note: I would bend over backwards to pay for something like this. Somebody make this something that I want.

To those that are about to tell me to make it myself, I'm not quite there yet. Soon though ;-)
Yes, I guess you are right. I have been bitten a few times by questions of memory before, so I was cautious in my answer.

There's still a lot for me to learn about how lazyness impacts memory requirements. (Some times Haskell was lazier than I was expecting and kept thunks in memory that were bigger than their eventual result.)
i'd look into chase paymentech or authorize.net if you are able to get a merchant account. chase's api is pretty blackbox but they have a soap api as well. authorize is less black box. Afaik, aka last time i checked, a while ago - chase was offering better rates and transacts in many currencies.
Great idea ELI... I like the 'rating' system... clever.
Hahaha. You know, there's a little truth in that. There does seem to be a sort of.. Captain Planet-esque attitude to all this.

"If we can just STOP the carbon everything will MAGICALLY get better and there will be PUPPIES and RAINBOWS."

I, for one, envision a future where the climate has already gone to shit and people go, "Fuck. Instead of spending hundreds of billions of dollars trying to reduce our carbon output, why didn't we spend it on ways to deal with the EFFECTS of the change instead!"
"Keeping an OpenVZ VPS running smoothly requires a lot more SysAdmin attention than keeping a Xen VPS running smoothly."

This is really interesting, I'm wondering if you can elaborate a bit?
Agreed.

On that topic, anyone know of a decent mysql lib for ruby that just lets me query and iterate over the results?

The one constantly at the top of google results is at tmtm.org, but my understanding is that it's not threadsafe or particularly speedy.

I saw something called asymy made by tptacek, but my impression was that the project was abandoned... Thomas, any comment on where that stands?
Apple iPhone 8GB AT&T
Apple iphone 8GB stunning widescreen display offers the ultimate way to watch TV shows and movies on a pocketable device, with touch controls for play pause, and volume iPhone includes and SMS application with a full QWERTY soft keyboard.
Perhaps. Perhaps Joel was mesmerizing Jeff with his vague knowledge of Psychology 101.
True. But a lot of that article seemed to be focusing not on carbon footprint, but electricity use. The title is somewhat misleading.

Infact, the entire gist of it was, in my eyes, "Servers are using TOO MUCH ELECTRICITY. WHAT CAN WE DO."
How CarsForAGrand.com Generated PR and Half a Million Visitors
It varies; you'll want to know quite a bit of Java for Scala and Groovy but less so for Clojure, in my opinion. Clojure has a quite distinct flavor and you see things like ring being used instead of servlets directly in compojure, etc. It'll be interesting to see how much of the standard Java toolkit gets reinvented due to distaste for the Java-ness of some of the stack (which isn't necessarily a bad thing.)

Practically speaking, I think you'll need to be at least a competent Java programmer for the next few years if you don't plan on reimplementing a lot of bits that are in the extended Java stack.
Is this really surprising? Blackberry has been an established market leader in this domain for years. Apple claiming the #2 spot with a single product in a 2-3 year time frame is pretty amazing, I think.
Curious about #2, did Atwood do coding on Stack Overflow? Spolsky's blog/videos seem to say Atwood was brought in only because he had a popular blog.
Yeah, the podcast has a lot of that. It's very ironic. It's quite common for Jeff to say something wrong, Joel to correctly correct him, and Jeff a) not be convinced and b) yield in the sort of "I know more than you do about this but I'm just going to be nice" way. I think it's delightfully, if not irritatingly, ironic.
I doubt it'll be this year. Lots of potential shoes out to drop yet. Maybe late next year?
It's not that SQL queries are difficult to compose, it's that ORMs enable different abstractions to emerge, at least when used appropriately; I'll admit though that junior developers are drawn most to ORMs because they limit exposure to SQL. I'd recommend you check out a legitimate ORM that implements the Data Mapper family of design patterns such as SQLAlchemy or Hibernate.

(Incidentally, DataMapper in Ruby doesn't in fact implement the Data Mapper pattern, which I find irritating.)
We compare the architectures of the web and the 3D web
Google Latitude Now Lets You Publish Your Location To Gmail Chat And Your Blog
BlackBerry Partners Fund announces 2009 BlackBerry Developers Challenge
Just curious, why don't you like OS X?
Exactly. Reading this article, I kept thinking of the 2000 NCAA tournament, where Florida was pressing hard and winning, and seeming unstoppable. Until MSU stopped them pretty emphatically.
MBAs vs. Entrepreneurs: Who Has the Right Stuff for Tough Times?
You just spoke of Smalltalk in that trollish tone. Hope you're happy.
Some kinds of schooling are beneficial in the long term. I know plenty of folks that thought getting their PhD was painful, and were glad they did it.
Twitter shuts down account mocking Idaho governor
Its totally the other way around, Jeff coded most of the StackOverflow site, sometimes in the podcast you can notice Jeff knows more about their codebase than Joel.
As somebody who spends most of his day reading articles written on very specific technical topics, it is a delight to run across articles like this: written for a different audience almost ~7 years ago, and it still has useful advice for us! Funny how that works.
Look hard enough and you'll find a prediction for every eventuality.
Good promotion, crappy site. All he is doing is scraping eBay auctions, which makes his results crap, since all of the results are in the process of bidding or haven't met reserve yet.
Yes, for some apps, the first-stage approval is clearly done by someone fairly non-technical, just reading from a list of things they need to deny apps for. I've had first-level reviewers deny apps for really silly things, in some cases where the problem was the reviewer's command of the english language, rather than the app itself. Resubmitted with no changes and it went through 6 days later.

Oh and there are no appeals at this stage. This isn't a democracy. Resubmit the binary and get to the back of the line, scruffy.

But if you do get forwarded on, it seems to take about 2x as long, and get you to someone inside Apple who knows a thing or two.
Any possible way to provide a description of the link as well, automatically? Perhaps display the page's meta name/desc and page title?
While it probably wasn't clear, that's what I was wondering about when I asked about using streams. I find using lazy evaluation by default confusing sometimes, so I think about it terms of using streams or iterators. (Or are they called generators? The kind of function that, when called, returns either the next value or an end-of-stream sentinel.)
Obviously a way for Twitter to make money would allow developers to pay to create mass accounts for these types of utilities.

Copyright is a different ball-game!
Hats of to the author, he did a very good job selecting the quintessentials.
Movie review: office spaces
Are you an IT-Geek then you'll love the universe of this film. Sad Peter Gibbons is is stuck in a cube farm, constantly harassed by an army of clueless ant-brained bosses. Read the full review of a true geek movie!
Though not a particular fan of URL shortening services, I do have to say I like that you have put an original and useful spin on the concept.
Oh wow, a URL shortener with a clear purpose and benefit. Nice work. :)
Some people feel ugly compared to others. Should we do something about that too?
err.. the "I'm at work" button should not redirect you to Disney.com. try Google instead. Otherwise, great idea.

[added link: http://isnsfw.com/yLyQTM]
This is a great idea. I really hope that this becomes ubiquitous with posting NSFW links.

It would be nice if you could affix multiple content descriptors, much like how the ESRB handles their rating system. See below for a reference:

http://www.esrb.org/ratings/ratings_guide.jsp
Tomato without doubt. Don't get me wrong, DD-WRT is good, tomato is better! Especially for QOS. Here's a howto on setting up tomato on asus 520gu

http://www.society9.com/an-easy-guide-to-installing-tomato-o...
This blog post provides almost no content; all it does it point out a Daily Show sketch about mathematical illiteracy. The bizarre 50% fallacy in that sketch was the punch line; the idea was, that fallacy was so retarded that just mentioning it, without explanation or retort, would be funny to most of The Daily Show's audience.
well... sorry to tell you this, but you're even more a fan of Jeff, practically you read all codinghorror articles
"In related news, almost four-fifths of Americans don't know that a trillion is a million million, and most think it's less than that. Is it any wonder why we're having so much trouble with national budget debates?"

No wonder at all. Especially if people think money from the government is free money.
The UMA feature is underrated. Being able to SMS and make and receive phone calls wherever there is free Wi-Fi (now lots of places) or a T-Mobile HotSpot is fantastic. Definitely has a 'the future is here now' effect, for me at least.
I like your idea.

Perhaps you should make the rating optional? If you want people to use this, you should make the number of steps required to a minimum
RIP Fravia
a couple wording suggestions:

"Offensive Material: Link contains offensive content such as references to religion, abortion, 911, and the devil."

"Link MAY contain", and 911 should be 9/11 (unless you're referring to the US emergency number)
Indeed. I've had managers that I liked and I pulled all-nighters for them (when I was younger) because they seemed to take a genuine interest in their employees. And I've had managers that seemed to have little interest in their employees other than as means to an end - those managers are tough to like and usually don't get nearly as much good work out of their people.
>What about evidence of design patterns? Does it look like the person who wrote the code doesn't know about things like Observer, Visitor, and Decorator patterns?

This is his criterion for a research position? Understanding of the unsolved problems in a domain? "Irrelevant."

Mathematical sophistication needed to abstractly model complicated-seeming scenarios? "A dime a dozen."

Know the decorator pattern? "omg, you're hired!"
Except the article itself is dishonest spin. As far as I am aware, corporations are not charged any taxes on profit in overseas subsidiaries until they are repatriated. So the 5% tax is greater than the 0% tax that they would have received on many sums if they did not have the tax holiday.

Pretty clear (breathless) partisan spin here. Low information, low quality, and I can't believe stuff like this isn't killed anymore.
It's a good technique for trying to keep complexity from getting out of hand. Unix pipes seem similar in many ways to a kind of message-passing concurrency (like in Erlang), before it was cool. :) The OS itself keeps tabs on the processes, handles buffering, etc.

The Unix style seems to fit together relatively poorly with complex type systems, though. Some programs (compilers, in particular) need very little interaction with the outside world, and tend to require complex internal data structures. Again, no one paradigm fits everything.
I can't help get the idea to solve this problem...

The idea is : "Move your factories, engineering teams to China, where patents issued in USA are ignored". The drawback is the company can only sell products outside U.S.

Am I joking? If the ShangZai manufacturers in China take a longer term view, they can do this. They are capable to adopt U.S. patents for their own products, except they will not be able to sell the products/services to U.S. But they can flood all markets in Europe and East Asia with their new adopted inventions.
Is this a proper use? http://isnsfw.com/liars
I'm not sure what he was going for in the discussion of #10. Why do people want to license designers?
Gray Hat Python: Python Programming for Hackers and Reverse Engineers Review
What a dumb asshole. Everything in the article is either banal, a straw-man, or very questionable, which contrasts a lot with his tone.

This guy somehow luckily got into a position of power where he is allowed to invest other people's money. Nobody would ever listen to him if it wasn't for that twist of fate.
really? people seemed to LOVE the disney.com redirect. They found it quite amusing :) It originally went to google though, like you suggested. We'll see how things test out and it might very well make it back to google.

Thanks for the feedback
-eli
> One of the ironies of the programming world is that using Lisp is vastly more productive than using pretty much any other programming language, but successful businesses based on Lisp are quite rare.

Citation is needed. Paul Graham doesn't count.
Hi Eli, suggestion for the "I'm at work" button. Make it redirect to something fun and informative. Like say, a random twitter trend or somesuch!
I have seen the movie and I found it funny and quite true-to-real life.

But I don't know whether this is appropriate for Hacker News.
So does Palm.
Startup 122: “Speech - The Final Frontier”
While it's proper use, if you read our ToS things as outrageous as foxnews are not allowed to be promoted with isnsfw... sorry. ;)
I like the idea, only problem is keeping it clean and simple... maybe version 2.0 will have this :)
The redirect to Disney is definitely clever and funny. But I have to agree with cedsav, the joke will go from cute to annoying pretty fast, google is better.
Another factor is simply price: the Curve on T-mobile (US) with equivalent voice/data service can be $20-$30 cheaper per month than iPhone on AT&T, even though the devices both retail for about $200 initially.
List of Really Useful Tools for CSS Developers
This is not an attempt to create a mega list of tools for CSS developers; only few but really useful tools have been selected and placed under appropriate categories. If you believe a really useful tool has been missed, please feel free to share the link in comments. You are also encouraged to recommend tools for new categories.
Yaw, Disney is safer for work, but still isn't what you want on your screen when your boss/coworker walks by.