skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
We were explicitly barred from using tools that were not published by Microsoft. Even if Microsoft didn't make a tool to solve the problem. Instead, we were encouraged to create our own, on our own time, outside of regular business hours.

The same place barred the use of code generators, the use of snippet macros, and they barred admins from creating automated scripts/utilities to automate gruntwork. They likened it to taking a math test without a calculator -- you should be able to do it by hand if you can supposedly do the job.

The same place also required that comments were not to be made in source code files. They should only be made in source control check-in comments.

The same place felt refactoring was an unproductive activity unless it corrected a specific "bug". Scalability and performance issues weren't considered valid bugs - it was fast before, so why would it ever be slow now? Blame would be put on the hardware until network ops bit back. Then you would be lambasted for your application not scaling 4 orders of magnitude on the same hardware when that wasn't part of the original requirements.

One place I worked for did not allow developers to use the bug-tracking system. Instead, someone from QA would place printout of open bugs in a bin. You were required to take the bug from the bin, back to your desk, and when completed, fill in a form by hand detailing the explanation and attach the appropriate colored paper strips in the right order so it could be triaged appropriately.

The same place migrated customer data to their product by hand. Using Excel. We jokingly referred to this process as "electronic handcrafting". The reason was because it was faster and resulted in fewer reported defects after deployment. Someone in that department got fed up, so she had me create ETL processes for the four most common competitor products. Time-to-install went from 4 weeks to 4 days and the error rate dropped 98%. It won over the COO and some staff, but made me enemies with plenty of others.

At the same place a sales manager convinced the COO that RAID1 should be considered a viable backup and disaster recovery solution. We were tasked with making it so RAID controllers would not back up certain types of files.

Another place I worked for as a contractor insisted that their web app was written in ColdFusion. Despite not having any other contractors past or present, and the market not having any ColdFusion developers. The reason ended up being is it because it "sounded cool". Needless to say, they have an app still running on ColdFusion 4.

I've worked in too many places that are adamant that "backups" are all the database version control they need.

I've worked at a place that would expect me to develop APIs for certain products and systems we had, yet refused to allow for a requirements gathering phase. I was actually fired trying to explain that I can't build something when I don't know what I was building. Reason was so the new CIO could bring on a contracting firm run by a friend of his. Three other people have since quit in response.
Hmm... please, release them! :) I'm looking at Lua now and IMHO there is a lack of libraries.

I always thought that Python lacks marketing (f.e. comparing to Ruby), but now I understand real meaning of the words "lacks marketing". Lua should be spread wider.
I think I have a single idea. It may not look like that I concede, but I do have an idea. Stack Overflow has a great idea, but they don't apply it to food. I am at the most basic level trying to create a stack overflow for food. Obviously the food audience and the geeks might be different, so in the long run the site needs to be different, but in the begging I am really just trying to copy.
Let me put it this way: does it make that much of a difference to the user if an app is a web-app or local? I think they're only aware of it insofar as sometimes they can't do what they want because the network is down. That, and they know that sometimes they can get at the same data from any networked computer.

Prism is exactly what I had in mind!
I have a theory that netbooks is much less about the form factor and much more about the price and battery life. observe how much more popular the large form netbooks are. everyone wants the 11 inchers and I bet there will be pressure to make 12 and 13 inchers. 99% of the notebook market doesn't want or need a desktop replacement, they just want a cheap notebook that works for office and the net.
Man, Mark Cuban and his disdain for YouTube. I don't understand it sometimes.

In general, all of Google's businesses are built to take advantage of large technological trends. Bandwidth will get cheaper and they have found other ways to decrease the cost, e.g. having users click on the HQ/HD button. Fundamentally, Google has always believed that any content out there should eventually be made free because there will be almost no transaction cost with technology. The only way to make money off it is through targeted advertising.
Point taken, I fixed that.
http://www.igoldrush.com/sell.htm
If I may self-promote a little bit:

http://phpcompiler.org
this was common practice about 15 years ago, before people discovered that putting biz logic in stored procs really sucked for UI interaction, sucked for maintainability (stored proc languages really suck), and truly sucked for scalability.
And UNIX was a fun hack to play "Spacewar" :)
Extensive use of Hungarian Notation ("i" before integers, "sz" before C-strings, and the kicker: "ob" before objects).

No use of STL, using a hand-rolled dynamic array instead that grew by a constant size instead of doubling.

Extensive amounts of application logic written right in the GUI builder's generated event handlers, for the company's very large flagship product.
My thought, too. The current results are underwhelming, but as page authors become aware this presentation is possible, some will incrementally make their markup 'squared'-friendly. Iterate until the results are impressive.
I was once banned from using ternary operators, that was weird
Y'know, I was thinking "right on", until I realized that I'm very used to double-clicking Google maps as a zoom shortcut. So I guess it conforms to the site's general usability theme.
How to contact Ron Conway?
Does anyone know his email? It doesnt seem to exist.
His disdain for YouTube comes from founding HDNet (www.hd.net), which is his play for where video entertainment will be after television. It's definitely not free.

In other words, he is far from unbiased. He does disclose this in his other blog postings, though, so he's generally not trying to hide anything but instead argue why his solution is better.
That's Space Travel: https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Space_Travel_...
Point 2 is a bad idea. SQL stored procedures are not a good way to implement business logic. Of course, people who hold the opinion that OO is a bad idea would think it's a great way -- it's pretty much the opposite of OO.

We do it that way so the business logic exists and is enforced in one place...Only the most trivial applications can afford to put all their business logic in the middle tier.

There are much better ways of enforcing business logic and controlling it all in one place, which would be compatible with configuration management/source control and much more convenient for most programming teams.

(Namely: just publish the business logic as a library and have standards that dictate its use. These can be enforced using automated scripts and a little process. You are also not restricted to the middle tier, though I'd still say it's a good idea.)
If you are not in the Valley probably you are out of luck...I would like to contact him too...but I'm not in the Valley.
I wondered what they were going to do with the LIDAR sensors on the Street View vehicles.

Maybe they didn't even know what they would do with it, but decided it was better to throw LIDAR in from the beginning and figure out what to do with it later, rather than having to drive every street in the world twice.

(Or maybe they used that data for the 3D models of buildings in Google Maps and Google Earth?)

Anyone know if the cars have any other sensors that haven't been utilized yet? I'm guessing they also recorded WiFi and possibly cell tower locations for geolocation.
perhaps he does not wish to be contacted except by people who he gives his contact information to?
I was fooled for a few reasons really, hacker news tells you the domain and before I clicked on it I assumed that this would have been written by someone at canonical. After seeing the structure of the url, I assumed at first that it was a personal homepage of someone working at canonical and that given the dates stated in the post, assumed that you had moved your pages from a previous employer. I also thought it was quite likely given the content and title that someone at canonical.com could have written it. It was only after looking around a bit that suspected that something wasn't right and hacked your url back to the domain. For me the first page I ever saw on your site was this one not the "front page".

I get the point that you had the domain first but unfortunately Canonical is now a large brand in the hacker space. I think at this point you risk misleading people unless you put a disclaimer on every page or change your domain :-(
Crowdsourcing. Micropayments. User-generated content.

TAOCP sounds tragically hip, when described like that.
I've been discouraged from putting code in reusable modules because it would mean one central location for everything to break. The rationale was that if every routine was copied and pasted where it was needed then introducing an error in one place would not affect other places.

I am leaving a company that uses a certain lightweight language to build web apps using CGI. There is no way to load libraries except by recompiling the runtime, and we do not have the C source code for that runtime in our possession. This means every library out there (even for the particular language we use, thanks to the fact that we're using a 9-year-old version of the language, and the inability to load binary libraries) is NIH'ed out from the start! Interfacing with external tools is broken because the function that runs system commands has been changed to be async with no access to the standard streams of the process it creates.

The product that is built on top of this is designed to let people build applications using flowcharts with a visual editor... but the "programming" that is the result of this system is essentially spaghetti code with GOTO, numbered labels, and a single global scope. Nodes in these flowcharts are labelled with 100, 110, 200, etc. by default and are laid out automatically, so there's no way to understand a routine at a glance. Variables in a flowchart get clobbered by other "subroutines" when they are called. Everything is indirections on indirections on indirections. I could go on... but you can get the idea by looking at this: http://imgur.com/ZKCU.png

This is all seen as advanced next-generation modeling that provides massive productivity gains over standard programming practices.

At one job I introduced SVN and Tortoise to try to bring version control to the project. A few weeks later we were using Visual Source Safe because the contractor goons couldn't grasp anything but VSS's Visual Studio integration. They also moved to doing development on one shared drive so that updating the whole tree could clobber someone's changes that weren't checked in.

I was also instructed to not use document.getElementById(), since the IE de-facto "standard" was to just refer to the element by its name (or whatever was going on back then).
I once had a boss that forbade regular expressions, including split().

The task was parsing datasets in a variety of formats (one per vendor, hundreds of vendors.)

The only acceptable way was substr. Everything else causes "memory fragmentation," apparently.

The language was Perl.
The Failed Promise of Innovation in the U.S.
The alternatives are not

1) Sproc
2) Scattered around the app haphazardly

The only apps I've seen use the BLL-as-an-sproc trick were written by people without any experience writing scalable code at a real company.
The bird's eye view in Live/Bing maps is kind of scary. I can practically see in the window of my old apartment.
Read http://paul.kedrosky.com/archives/2009/06/insufficient_in.ht... for more
Isn't that more the rule than the exception?
I think this is his website: http://www.baselineventures.com/

There's a lot of information on it too...you can find lawyers and other advisors. And some really cool web2.0 advice.

:D
The Siren Song of Startups
I like it, but what does it say about me that I need an electronic babysitter?
That's good to know, I would suggest for credibility, stating these instead of the sentence you have.
How did you find so many bad jobs (they sound horrendous)? More importantly, why did you take them, let alone keep them?
The whole article is flawed - it's based on the false assumption there is such a thing as an advanced Windows user. :-P
have you ever seen them abused ? you'd understand why : (or at least have you thought about it ? you'd understand why : (or at least you can get the gist from this ? good : I can't help you))
Huh, I assumed it was just fairly-smart geometry estimation. How else could they compensate for the LIDAR hitting cars & people?
There is an eternal tension between elite opinion's love for democracy and its distaste for the tastes of the common man. (We, on the right side of the education and income bell curves, qualify as "elites").
Post your start-up on Hacker News. Maybe someone who knows him will be impressed enough to mention you in passing.
I was paid over six-figures to share a computer with another programmer all day long even though studies have shown that to halve productivity.
In a similar vein:

Have you read the Drupal source ? Exactly : Take a look
I think you may have misunderstood what I meant. I meant that if people were colluding to not hire people from various companies, it would make sense that the Federal government is involved, as that would be a problem.

If it is just a "we won't actively recruit", then it doesn't make sense to me. This seems a valid thing to do. Actively recruiting vs. denying hiring are two radically different things, and the Feds getting involved in the decision of where to recruit from seems silly.
That was perfectly clear to me... :D
Genetics Ideas
Hey thanks for the feedback. I took your idea of burnt garlic, if you don't mind. Burnt Garlic was taken, so I registered http://brntgarlic.com instead. A bit 2.0ish but I like it.
Startups: would you sponsor a netbook?
I agree with those people, actually. I don't see why it's wrong for people to choose who they associate with. That seems like a pretty basic freedom to me.

Discrimination is the ability to tell things apart. If Google has a rule against poaching from their friends and partners, that's fine with me; if they're underpaying all of their employees, what you're really saying is that someone who doesn't participate in the cartel gets their choice of the top technical talent in the valley. If you seriously believed this, you'd be raising money for a startup to exploit it, rather than complaining about it on news.yc.
Rumor has it theres a coding standards manual floating around at IBM that forbids the use of pointers. In c++. Yes indeed.
"Because AFAIK it wasn't limited to partners/competition. It was more of a backroom "we won't if you won't" agreement between a large web of tech companies."

You've missed my question. What is "it"? We won't what? We won't recruit from you, or we won't ever hire anybody with you on the resume?

It's two completely different things and munging them together is confusing and wrong.
I was told not to use constants on the left hand side of an expression e.g., if("hello"==strVar) and was made to change it throughout my code. Needless to say I quit after making that change.
AvantGo is AvantGone
The only thing better than ridiculous coding standards are the fanciful explanations for them.
Ask HN: What's the best IRC client for a Mac?
I am using Colloquy but looking for a change. Is there anything better out there?
Promote code that's indented 3 spaces instead of 2: rejected by QA.

Promote code that deletes the entire production Customer Database if the user hits "Esc" on Form 11 by accident: no problem. Unless it's indented 3 spaces instead of 2. Then it's rejected.
So that's how they did it. I thought they had some amazing image and visual recognition. I've been working on a little something similar but these types of problems are hard.
There are probably quite a few MBA students scrambling for internships right now, atleast one of them has to be decent.
Well, that explains how it would be punished. But that's like me explaining that what Google and Yahoo did is fine, because if one of them broke the agreement, the other companies would poach from them. You're begging the question.
I fully agree with Steven that product/market fit is the most important item to focus on. Marc Andreesen echoes this very point in http://blog.pmarca.com/2007/06/the-pmarca-gu-2.html
It's called legacy it happens companies have been working on a code base for more than couple of years, and the current trends change.
Not that I've found...
"Another lesson: I kept an oversized (perhaps giant is a better word) Moleskine by the door, and we wrote down great moments and quotes as the days wore on. We’ve already worked our way through it frontwards, and now we’ve turned it over and are working back the other way."

I don't get it. Then what? Does it ever get read, or by writing things down do people remember the quotes and moments better?
StumbleUpon.
Faecbook, as well, but not so much. There's not as much to do on there. StumbleUpon is a potentially infinite time sink.

In fact, I'd say Google Reader has increased my productivity, since once I've skimmed the days articles from Slashdot/TechCrunch/etc, I crack on with some work, and I'm not as tempted to use SU.
YouTube probably costs a small fortune, even in Google terms, to keep running. So I think the question is: how long can they keep running YouTube at a huge loss before shareholders grow unhappy?
Could social gaming companies get nailed for illegal gambling?
"...and no sentence begins with “bring up the terminal” or any other UNIX techno-babble."

I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess that his intended audience probably doesn't include many HN readers...
They've made multiple passes by now, you would assume there aren't always going to be cars or people in the way. There could easily be some data scrubbing smarts in there, too, like knowing that a 3 story building doesn't suddenly jut out to the road in its lowest six feet (notice, for instance, in Brooklyn, the stoops aren't considered part of the building surface).
Hungarian notation makes sense if (a) you have to declare all your variables at the top of the function, so you can't see the variable types, and (b) you don't have a code browser that gives you type information when you hover over a symbol. More and more, neither of those are true, so I find Hungarian fairly useless.
i sense a troll
Is it? The article didn't give me that impression - all I got was the sense that Google's recruiters were discouraged from seeking employees from these companies.
Whatever their CDN is running on is irrelevant.
Boo... I want one that does smart replies...
Kayak is ITA's QPX engine on the back end - Lisp :)
I really like XChat Aqua (http://xchataqua.sourceforge.net/). It's not really being maintained anymore, but don't let the low version number scare you. It has never crashed on me once. I like it because I was so used to XChat on Linux, it provides me with a familiar interface.

If you're hardcore, try MacIrssi (http://www.sysctl.co.uk/projects/macirssi/), which is seeing lots of active development.
I'm curious; what throughput are you getting on the private network now?
I actually once worked for a large insurance software company. They had a desktop workstation application that was entirely written in C. It consisted of about 2000 DLLs, which were used to get a kind of primitive polymorphism. Most of the money came from "customizing" the app for clients, and most of the labor for that came from local community colleges, where they had an intro to C programming class where they implemented a doubly-linked list. As a result, these "local talent" programmers would only use doubly-linked lists for collections, and would re-implement it every time they needed a new collection! As a result, every customized app had about 500 re-implementations of a doubly-linked list! (There were more collections than that in the entire app, but the core was written by competent programmers.) And yes, the same mistakes were made each time, and it was re-debugged every time.

I was there on a project where the client's IT department had implemented a universal library for doubly-linked lists. None of my fellow programmers understood how it worked (clever use of macros to get pointer offsets) and management would only use it for that particular client.

(They charged hourly for the "customizations.")
You can use the ternary operator without abusing it.

That said, that made complete sense.
Actor David Carradine found dead in Bangkok
1. Awesome visual design

2. I really like the screenshots and large sign up button. They're all the same screenshot, though, so I can't get a better idea of what is inside.

3. I'm not the target audience since I'm not a professor. I wish there was a video or more screenshots so that I could see all your work before I need to create an account.

Small CSS issue: I'm on FF3, looks like a vertical spacing issue with your search go button (id is global_search-submit).
Just took a look as I'm very interested in education. Clean design, but the purpose was unclear.

* Screenshots too zoomed out to be useful. Looks like some type of list, but of what?

* List concrete examples of what the site does. "Organize and share learning materials" --> I can do that on del.icio.us right now. How is this different?

* Sign up page: empty list of schools. Go to wiki/US News and import a list of accredited schools. But stepping back, why must this be presented so early? Have it as a profile field.

* Why isn't search on the homepage? [If this is about discovering/sharing new materials]. I need to have an idea of what people are using it for today. I want to search on "calculus" and see what comes up to understand what the site does.

* Don't repeat the banner text on the homepage [top bar, 2nd bar]. Have a different pitch.

I didn't sign up for an account because I'm not sure what the purpose is. Do you have a tour? Read-only demo account without login? See if you can list out clear benefits. I know 37Signals is bandied about often, but take a look at basecamphq.com. Notice the list of features with mini-screenshots (at a res where you can tell what's happening):

Assign tasks
Share files
Track time
Meet deadlines

Something like that would go a long way to explaining what the site does. Let your homepage be a big sales letter for new users. Returning users will just skip it and click login anyway.
"Government is not some exterior entity, it's the expression of the people at large."

Perhaps collectively, in the same way that smog is the expression of motorists at large. But that doesn't mean anyone has consented to it, especially when that government is on balance injurious to some group of people living inside of it.
of course I meant most of the time. Of course they'll do things to jar you to full consciousness (good or bad). If they were that routine, who would want them?
Version control done wrong:

Version was code written onto a CD-R

Control was a person who got a full 60K Salary for monitoring a room with a bunch of file folders with different versions of the software. When you made a commit you burned a new CD and brought to Tim on the 5th Floor.

You can't make this stuff up.
Hackers Claim $10,000 Prize for Breaking Into StrongWebmail
7 Factors That Led to the Financial Crisis