skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think I've read those essays, but the fact I can't remember explicitly doing so indicates that, frankly, they didn't do too well in terms of convincing me .. my position is based on 30 years of working day and night as a professional programmer, so maybe I'm quite biased, but it is an opinion I have formed and used successfully in training others in my team to get stuff done. It doesn't matter what language you use; what matters is that you are interested in using it to get the job done. If a language contains features that don't interest you, it won't be useful: period. Ultimately, all language features must be judged by the level of interest they incur, and how that interest is applied towards making something useful with the language.

That said, I'm perfectly aware of how wrong my argument can be, but like I said .. works so far ..
Ask HN: Personality Assessments in the Workplace?
I was talking with a family member recently who told me that his company is going to be administering DISC assessments [1] as part of a human resources workshop in the near future. While he's not so concerned that these would be used directly in future promotion decisions, he does have some other concerns.

* He worries that the decision making process of the business could be short-circuited (perhaps only sub-consciously) to allow easier dismissal or acceptance of some suggestions or proposals based on the categorization of the person behind it, rather than on its own merits.

* Both of us having been raised in the households of psychologists are inclined to believe that personality inventories such as this are pseudoscientific. We're well acquainted with the Forer (or Barnum) Effect [2] and are not very willing to trust anything based entirely on self-evaluation of 45 or so questions.

* Even so, he feels that it's the psychological equivalent of being asked to drop trou in front of one's coworkers and is understandably uncomfortable about that.

* He seems to be the only one that has severe problems with this. Everyone else seems to be embracing it or at least accepting it as something that you just have to do. The later option feels intellectually dishonest to him, given the objections above.

Management is selling this as something that will enable better communication since people will be able to craft their interactions based on the other person's type. I've recommended that he ask for concrete examples of how they would tell him X if his type were Y vs. Z.

So, does anyone have any experience with these personality assessments in the workspace (or even specifically with DISC)? Any good recommendations for how to make these objections clear without becoming a pariah? Or are these concerns exaggerated somehow?

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DISC_assessment

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forer_Effect
Nice. Looking forward to the release. Eclipse is a love/hate product. I personally love it.
Promoting a new site and keeping your hands clean
If you don't mind sharing, what's the name of your application? I'd like to see what balance you chose.
I wonder how this or any other discovery concerning Darwin's theory of evolution might affect current religions who don't accept it.
What if this, or any other, is presented by major media as undeniable proof of the theory?
On the other hand, some religions reject fossils, so you can never underestimate the power of dogmatism..
I don't think that non-obvious and "good developers" should be joined together in one sentence. It's possible to do a lot of macro magic, it's possible to do a lot of function manipulation, but this is not good development. This is efficient development when you are working with projects or systems that require that sort of thing (maybe large dataset manipulation or embedded systems), but in my opinion, doing those things is bad programming.

The reason is simple: They are difficult to understand. Code is communication, and there are two listeners - and when you are pushing function pointers around using macros, the human is going to have huge problems understanding what you are trying to achieve.

So I don't think exploiting particular features of a language to extreme levels when it is unneccesary makes you a good programmer in that language - I actually think it makes you worse.

It's like writing a book - you have a certain vocabulary at your disposal, and you can say almost anything you want with that vocabulary. There are different levels of obscurity in the words you use you can reach - you gain in expressiveness, but you narrow your audience. When you write a book for molecular biologists, then the particular terms you use should not be the same as when you write a biology textbook.

That's why I think that one can be a good C programmer without going much deeper than the C subset commonly used in C++.

This is part of my general philosophy in programming - clarity, simplicity and structure first, efficiency second. The machines will catch sooner or later, anyways.
Not sure if it just me or not, but anybody noticed the count-down on the right sidebar actually says 46 days? It's May 20 today, and it should be 16 days until June 6, unless someone forgot that JavaScript's month is 0-indexed?
I have been hunting for a good GTD application which weaves seamlesslsy with your life ( Gmail in my case ). So far the only application I have been content with is RememberTheMilk. Check out it's integration with Gmail using the Firefox plugin.
On a side note, I was most surprised when I came across the Twitter spam. I knew about Craigslist being relentless in spamming personal ad posts but I found out about the Twitter spam through trying out Scoopler.
Wave Power Development Hits Some Rocks
CS Homework by Josh Peek
"A hacker is a hacker," he said with a shrug.
It (Basecamp) is simple enough that our clients can use it. Enough said.
It would be good to be able to try out your app before creating an account.

I want to quickly get a feel for it without going to the hassle of creating an account.

Yes, I know you have a screencast, but that's not what I want.

I would like to see a 'Try Me Out' button that gets me into the app an allows me to click on buttons etc. to see what they do.

edit: Oops, I missed the link to the demonstration. Maybe make it bigger.
What happened to FreeHg?
The economics of the $9.99 ebook
> spend less time "exercising", eat anything we want, and continue to be healthy and trim anyway.

Perhaps you would like a pony as well?

Here in Italy they grill them up (well, horses, not ponies), and they're quite good.
I didn't read the OP's question as hostile, or suggesting their applications are rubbish. I think it's a valid question - clearly some people are willing to pay money for inferior products, because they value other things. Trust? support? name brand? Love RoR and want to support people using RoR?

Analysing what those things are seems a good idea if you're trying to emulate it, and you can't do that by "Trying the app yourself". The best way, as the OP has done, is ask customers why they pay for it.

I have tried Campfire, and I'm still not quite sure why people pay for it. I think you can take simplicity too far personally. It could be replicated on a weekend (As was done at google with huddlechat) so I don't see the value proposition there. I haven't tried basecamp so maybe that's more complex.
Are you from Singapore?
It won't last long. Palm has done this over and over. They launch on one carrier first because they get paid a lot to do it, then 6 months later start rolling out to everyone else.
If I were to extend C by adding python style classes on top of it, I would end up with roughly the same number of keywords. I don't think it's true that C++ has a lot of new concepts in the language itself.

I agree that C++ is very library oriented, and it changes your approach to the language, but this is not a fault of the language itself, this is a side-effect of its very wide popularity.

If you have a pattern used by a library, then that is the fault of the library, but not a fault of the language. The language does not come with any patterns.

Templates in C++ are not good, but they are not widely used in the real world. Most people ignore them, and that's good so.
I got in. Haven't done anything with it yet.
Somewhere along the line, however, the rich dropped from the ranks of professional sports and top-tier amateur athletics almost entirely.

Because as sports became lucrative careers, as opposed to expensive hobbies, young hungry people applied themselves to the fullest in sports as their ticket to upward mobility.

Sports, in turn, lost their cachet and prestige (Prole-drift) and the rich went to find other activities with high barrier of entry, like golf, car collection, yachting, high-stakes gambling or even newer types of toy businesses (film, media, fashion, etc.) and finance to channel their competitive drives.

Why is Vanity Fair asking stupid questions they don't intend to answer?
Creationist preliminary comment on Ida.

Does Ida Deserve the Attention? A Preliminary Comment
http://www.answersingenesis.org/articles/2009/05/19/ida-miss...
One of the problems I saw when I first used WA is that it doesn't tell you where the numbers come from. There are no bounds on error, no way to tell how recent they are, no way to see how they were derived. With Google, at least you can usually find a person to ask -- a webmaster, if nothing else. With Wikipedia, you can sometimes get a citation so that you can decide for yourself how reliable the source is -- or, failing that, at least you can see the edit history. But no such luck for WA.

Since the WA results appear to be clickable but don't go anywhere, I assumed that some feature would be later added to show you from whence the results were derived. But from reading this article, it sounds like they want you to believe that WA is the source of the knowledge itself. (Of course, playing loose with references and methodology for the greater glory of Wolfram is something of an inherited trait... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_New_Kind_of_Science#Methodolo...)
If you want to be a master of the machine use C/C++; if you want to be a slave use Java; If you want to be a slave of a slave then its C# for you. Simple :)

( Disclaimer : My comments are limited to only the above 'popular' languages in discussion. Also I program purely on *nix, so I am not aware of your other dark or better worlds out there )
I cannot jump back into my 23 y/o mind but my 32 y/o mind firmly believes with experience as proof ::

Simple solutions are Best.

XML is evil and should never have been released

Reading your own old code is hard, for the love of G-d please make it simple

And so most controversially ::

- Try to minimize the intricacy of any lamda-ultimate code you write. Y Combinator[1] with closures is great now... 6 months you won't be able to remember it.

- If at all possible invoke lisp / functional heart within an easy to follow procedural harness.

------

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y_combinator not PGs company of the same name
Official White House Youtube Channel
Wolfram Alpha lets you get the position. eg http://wolframalpha.com/input/?i=sun+at+9am+in+London
Microsoft to Unveil Search Engine
Developer To Block Belgian Gov't From Using His Technology Over Tax Dispute
As a libertarian, I'm definitely sensitive to the issue, and look forward to reading the article.

I think the threat of oppressive government is much higher from democracy than from any robots.

If I were starting a new country, it wouldn't be a democracy, but a extremely small government that by built in limits couldn't be oppressive. In such a case, I'd prefer to have automated police and military forces, to have fewer human points of failure. I consider, for example, the Roosevelt court packing debacle to be a significant human point of failure in our democracy.
Facebook Verified Apps Rolling Out Tomorrow
Eat half the portion you are served at restaurants, and eat slowly. dont eat unless you are hungry. following those simple guidelines ive lost 15 lbs in 3 months
Windows Media Center gets Netflix’d
One of the problems with present-day technology is that the capability of wiping out the human species is a possibility, even if vanishingly small. It's hard to refute the argument that "The value associated with the destruction of the human race is minus infinity, so the expected value of doing anything that has a nonzero probability of destroying the human race is also minus infinity."

But we seem to be comfortable with this existential threat on some level given that we switched on the LHC and we have thousands of nukes ready to destroy every major city on the face of the earth within hours.

It all comes down to costs and benefits. If we try to minimize this existential threat by building some sort of infrastructure so that biohackers can conduct their experiments with oversight we're going to lose something. In this case, we'd be losing research that qualified scientists could be doing instead of babysitting people who, on average, probably have no idea what they're doing.

Plus, institutionalizing the process seems to me to defeat the purpose of biohacking--using unconventional techniques to solve problems. In the facilities you describe, I'm not sure the biohackers would have the freedom to perform the experiments they want. True, it would significantly reduce the odds of a catastrophic virus leaking to the general population, but it would also reduce the odds that someone discovers some "miracle cure." (Of course, the odds of this happening either way are pretty small, but I'd reckon that the odds of something good coming out of these garage experiments is at least an order of magnitude greater than the odds of anything bad happening.)
"My client feels safe here. His own village is dominated by poverty and sharia..." and Pirates!

Chutzpah.
It's true. I would've bought 5 or 6 e-books in the past month if they were all $9.99.

The ones I needed were well over $50 and so I spent the extra time finding free alternative. They're lower quality, but unless it's under $10 it's worth the extra research I have to do myself.
First look: JBoss Drools grows up, and out
There's a quote in that thread that says something I've come to strongly believe over time:

"Just to pick a single thing on the list, it takes at least as much time to analyze what a system is doing under debug. In other words, after you write the code, you spend at least as much time wondering what the system is actually doing, even if the code is nearly all correct.

Starting about three years ago, I started telling folks you not only had to write code that runs correctly, you also must provide some kind of support to see whether code is running correctly. Even if there are no bugs, some emergent effect at runtime will puzzle you, and a long time can be consumed by tracing the cause and effect back to appropriate roots. When you work on a team with several other folks, after the first agonizing bug shows up, you can spend a lot of time proving your part of the system does exactly what expected, and didn't play a role in the observed chaos.

Lately I seem to spend most of my time in forensic system analysis as a local coroner for other folks' code fatalities. I never had an ambition to be a code coroner.

It would be enormously helpful if a language -- and not just one particular development environment -- had explicit support for generating evidence of what and how a system actually got from one point to another."
Next up for France: police keyloggers and Web censorship
In-depth exposé reveals Microsoft’s Xbox 360 failure rate was 68%
Product Development is what your Startup needs
We use Basecamp and Highrise because I haven't seen anything better. And by better I don't mean "has more features".

The products are simple and obvious in their nature. That is why we use them.
I don't really see the great advantage of this over a simple task list. I've tried several GTD apps, and I eventually settled in to Google Calendar with Google Tasks loaded in the sidebar.

For those who care, Google tasks can be accessed directly here:

http://mail.google.com/tasks/ig
Are you sure he's wrong?

If so, how are you sure?

For one thing, recall that these are amateur hackers at the beginning of the hacking curve; today playing with E. Coli, five years from now in possession of full-on sequencers, producing and inserting arbitrary DNA, ten years who knows?

He may in fact be right. As much as we'd all like to dismiss the possibility, I don't actually see a rational basis to declare that he's absolutely wrong. We don't know. Nobody know. There are some arguments you can make about why he's wrong, but all the arguments are probabilistic, about how evolution probably would have discovered something of that lethality, but it's only probabilistic.
Craigslist Sues South Carolina Attorney General McMaster; Asks For Restraining Order
Weight itself is not a complicated issue. Eating healthy is not a complicated issue. Staying in reasonable shape is not a complicated issue.
Unfortunately, many people overcomplicate it. It is easy to observe that the people who overcomplicate it, are the same people who believe that since it's simple, it should be easy.
Better not hand-deliver your own mail, folks. Just use your system's MTA to take care of the mail delivery and call out to something like send_email ($to, $subject, $body) that sends mail as the Erlang process' user. Postfix will let you use gmail as a relay host with:
relayhost = [smtp.gmail.com]:587
This article, and many others like it, seems to be so anti-science that I'm surprised it didn't end with "And that's if the LHC doesn't vaporise us all first!"

I just get massively incensed with the tone of pieces like this - their strong implication that the pursuit of knowledge is inherently A Bad Thing and the readiness with which they are prepared to be scared is so pervasive that sometimes I honestly get the impression that, to the average person, I must seem like an absolute lunatic for my intellectual pursuits.

For example, I've recently been playing around a lot with the Arduino. An acquaintance of mine, upon seeing my desk strewn with various wires and components, immediately asked "Wow, are you making a bomb or something?" - how crazy is that? Now, this person may not be particularly well versed in science or technology, but the fact that the first thing he thought of when exposed to a bit of it was "BOMB!" could well tell you a little about just how dangerous articles like this one can be once they've become the norm.

Maybe it's just human nature to be scared of things we don't understand, but something seems to be eroding the average person's very desire to understand in the first place. I can't help but think that scaremongering such as this is not helping in the slightest.

(And I apologise for jumping on this article as an excuse to have a bit of a rant, but it just makes me so very, very angry.)
Less features than what? You criticize their products, yet offer no viable alternative. A better question would be "why do you use X instead of Y", where X is a particular 37 signals product, and Y is an alternative that you like better.

Personally, I use Backpack after trying (and not liking) a whole bunch of other solutions for todo lists. I tried

- Outlook

- Pen and paper

- Simple text file

- Command line todo tool (Lifehacker)

- Remember the milk

- Google tasks

and I'm probably forgetting something, it's been a while.

I use Backpack because it's:

- Incredibly simple and intuitive to use

- Offers organization system that makes sense (pages, notes and lists - I use nothing else)

- It's easy and fast to find anything I want

- I can use it everywhere - on my phone, desktop, and the web. I use the web-based client at work and at home, also Mac desktop widget at home, and Satchel on my iPhone. The synching is seamless everywhere.

I'm not going to dignify the "RoR hype" with a response.
While I agree that turmeric (cucurmin) has a substantial number of medicinal capabilities, I disagree with the title of the article.I took the time to find out that research paper, and the professor says verbatim

"Again, based on this data, we have no way of telling whether curcumin could prevent fat tissue growth in humans.Meydani said. The mechanism or mechanisms by which curcumin appears to affect fat tissue must be investigated in a randomized, clinical trial involving humans." [http://nutrition.tufts.edu/docs/pdf/releases/090518_Meydanit...]

Unless its proved, we can't assert that "Indian curry will help you lose weight." The title should have been "Indian curry MAY help you lose weight."
Three Entry Level Nokia Phones will be Ready Soon
I doubt it. Steam does pretty well on PCs, and one could argue that the Ubuntu (or other Linux) ecosystem is a successful "centralized moderated software collection". If anything, I think we'll see a growth of App Store-like systems on other platforms. I'm a little surprised Microsoft and Apple haven't tried to roll something like this to their desktops yet.
What a great opportunity it would be for someone to replace the traditional role of the publisher with what the blog-author calls a "lightweight service". Then authors could go directly to these disaggregated services for marketing and editing and then to Amazon for e-publishing. The traditional publishing houses are going the way of the dodo and print newspaper.
L.A. will start using multiple choice test to identify future gang members
Templates in C++ are not good, but they are not widely used in the real world.

Depends on where your "real world" is. C++ usages are vendor and library dependent. My C++ code looked different in MFC/COM/ATL than in FLTK and that too was different than Qt. Choosing the right C++ becomes a matter of choosing the right vendor, and if that choice isn't up to you, well, tough luck.
If you hadn't mentioned it, I wouldn't have noticed that it was written by Nolan Bushnell, the founder of Atari and Chuck E. Cheese. The guy who once had Steve Jobs working on an assembly line wiring up arcade games. Double kudos to you for making me do the double-take.
The purpose of journalism is to monitor the sources of power. The people doing that job should NOT be low-paid.
Most-Popular Lists Breed More Popularity
2 things strike me.

The first is good one Craigslist: pre-emptive action is always the best move and I bet this crushes the guy! :D

The other is McMaster should sue TechCrunch for an image calling him a jerk - that's defamation :P
My startup is working on an Opentable competitor (beta this fall, very excited). The article points out the most important part of the online reservation business..."restaurants are really paying $515 to gain 197 new customers [average]".

They're charging for the wrong thing (big software/hardware cost upfront, and price per reservation), and not focusing on the real value that they provide which is generating new customers. The software should be almost free upfront and easy to use. The focus of the business should be generating new customers and helping restaurants better monetize and market to the diners that use the system.
I've tonnes of experience with merchant accounts too. But my chargebacks were never more than 2-3%. Most of the time I was selling digital goods.

What happened was each time someone did a chargeback, I would have to fill in a form to rebut it or accept it. I would always rebut it because I offered a 100% moneyback guarantee, no questions asked. So it did not make sense for anyone to do a chargeback; if they wanted their money back, they only had to ask, not chargeback. As a result, many of my chargebacks got thrown out and I simply refunded.

I think the lesson here is if you are selling physical goods, ESPECIALLY high ticker items, be extra careful. That could mean calling to confirm before shipping the item.
Portfolio.com will live
Acme-style mouse chording for Emacs