skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Write short methods

Although this is OO dogma, it's contradicted by the research literature. Empirical studies of function length show no benefit to shorter functions. Several studies have found them to be correlated with higher defect rates and costs (up to a threshold of a few hundred lines, at which point defects and costs start to rise again).

I was suprised when I first heard this. I think it's explained by the fact that adding function calls is not logically free: it adds conceptual overhead. Factoring code into shorter functions for its own sake doesn't produce benefit that exceeds this cost. There's a fundamental tradeoff here, which a dogmatic belief in short (or long) functions just misses.

Of course, the higher-level the language the shorter all your functions become.
With all due respect, this is where I do not agree.

Microsoft is a company with a very diverse product spectrum and $60B in revenue. One has to give them some credit for sustaining high level of revenues and profit growth. It would be only fair to consider that they do have a lot of very smart people who can perhaps tell when is a short cut (FAST, Powerset ?) a better way to success and when the sheer commitment to high level of craftsmanship is the primary way.

With the search business being so dominated by Google (and for very good reason), introducing an entirely new brand name like Bing is a LOT of work, just to get people's ears and eyeballs. To overcome such a huge startup latency because of a new brand, a $100m investment in marketing sounds perfectly reasonable. Overall, I think they are investing a total of ~$500m in the online business operating expenses for the year.
>> And they only took off because Linus is not a total dick

> Have you ever seen Linus on usenet?

"Not a total dick" in Internet terms is something like "A little to the left of Mao." However, Linus is also very astute and capable. People will tolerate "does not suffer fools gladly" if they are not a fool, or if they like the person's work.

Every programmer with an ego should ask themselves, "Am I an unjustified asshole?" Consider:

- Do a lot of people mostly like your work?
- Does the cost/benefit of alienating people vs.
shutting down the fools generally work out positively?
(For the community not just for your personal
gratification.)
- Do people complain about you profusely, but for
some reason still grudgingly respect you?

Answer yes 3 times? Congrats: you are not an unjustified asshole!

Are you a delusional asshole?

- Do only a select few understand your work, and do you
think even they are all inferiors?
- Are you *always* right?
- Do the people who are trying to do something valuable
generally try to ignore you?

Answer yes 3 times? Well, don't worry about it, you're probably one of the few who are genuinely ahead of their time and misunderstood. ;-)
Best Fathers Day Gifts
Fathers Day Gifts can be found at GettingPersonal.co.uk.
> the GM supply chain, the local economies of several large industrial states

I don't see how these are going to just disappear if GM is gone. There are other car companies these suppliers can sell to. Of course there will be disruption, and probably some job losses, but not the whole 2-million-person industry (to use the industry number). And if some of those jobs do disappear, maybe it's because demand for the product no longer supports them.

I know my perspective is different on this, because I'm 25, and honestly cannot fathom a lifetime with one company. My career will be a couple years here and there, and most likely I'll have more than one career as well. So it is alien to me that anyone wants to protect (or even prefers) this idea of having a single job, at a single employer, for life. Why is it so terrible that someone might have to find a new job or that a town might die out?

That said, I'm not unfeeling about this issue. I realize these are real lives here (my dad is a GM retiree). What I don't understand is why we are bailing out the company, and not the workers.

I'd rather we spent the money on retraining the employees, hopefully giving them skills in an industry that isn't slowly dying. And this generalizes to all those losing their jobs, no matter the industry. Stop trying to save the individual companies (bailouts) or whole industries (tariffs and subsidies) and educate people.
Everyone hears the "good" about startup life, but it isn't all good. But that doesn't mean you quit, either.

+1
"My other priority is to ensure that the core essence of Chrome's
design makes it to each of our platforms. A key aspect to this is the
"Skyline" of the browser with tabs merging with the title bar and the
general visual design. There are other aspects too mainly related to
how certain features work. To me, it's important that the product be
recognizable from a distance as "Chrome" - e.g when seen on TV or over
someone's shoulder. I do believe it's possible to achieve this and
still be harmonious with the target operating system. "

Ben Goodger (From the chromium-dev mailinglist)

And when this was complained about Alex Russell replied by saying "Then you don't want Chrome"

http://groups.google.com/group/chromium-dev/browse_thread/th...
We use GlusterFS and hate it. It's healing seems to do more bad than good and we're looking at moving all of our files to S3 instead.
At any time, in any place, no matter how healthy you are, you can die. So I'm going to say it again, and keep on saying it, because I get so tired of hearing news like this:

SIGN. UP. FOR. CRYONICS. NOW.
To be fair to Bram, he had the technical insight to deliver a workable P2P protocol with the ability to distribute demand at a nice granularity. Because of that, his protocol was technically superior to the competitors. Also, he did not try to tackle search and do it badly.

Napster was a bad implementation at the right time.

RoR - credit should be given. Sometimes just getting off your duff and starting something is what the world needs. Motivating many others to refine code into something useful deserves credit.

(EDIT: I am not saying anything was/wasn't a work of genius. I'm just saying it's truly creditable, whatever it was.)
Nice little article until the wheels fell off: "Comments are evil". Couldn't disagree more. Few things suck worse than having to dive into someone else's code that isn't commented.
my condolences go to you too endtime. I can't imagine how shocked you might be when someone you have seen just yesterday is no longer with us.
So if I just change the current header to say HTTP 1.1 am I done, or does that require additional changes?
With regards to the current recession hitting the developed and developing worlds differently, I was looking at this graph a while back: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:2007-2009_World_Financial_... and I'm still trying to decide how to interpret it. Does it mean that the US was the epicenter of the blast and the shock waves just haven't hit the economies that are less tied in yet? Or is it indicative of the world's wealth moving towards equilibrium (the Western world decelerating while the developing world accelerates)?
I spent some time working in the UK. At that time it was illegal for a company to employ you unless you have a National Insurance Number, but one of the requirements to getting one of these numbers was having an employer. About the only to get one was to find an employer who was willing to let you work without a number on the understanding that you would then get one pretty quick (which of course then requires taking a full day off work, or two in my case)

Note: This was my experience in the late 90's. May be different now.
Not here, Yudkowsky. Not right now.
Can you turn off that jazzy background please. I feel dizzy looking at all those stripes.
start it to execute a haunting vision that you can't get rid of

I agree with this - only partly, because it isn't necessarily in a person's control - but a haunting vision that you can't get rid of is a real asset. It's easier to devote insane effort to something that your intellect and/or soul are deeply invested in than to something arbitrary or trivial. I wonder whether luck is more of a factor in the latter kind of project.

In any case, I am having this experience these days, quite unexpectedly as I never set out to have it and used to feel dismissive when hearing people talk about "vision". I'm grateful for it. It makes it easier to crawl over broken glass.
for 40B, people will get into starting up for the salary.

That will simply be another challenge the application process will need to address. That's assuming it even becomes a problem.
Anonymously non-anonymous in knowing who contributed? Still seems Orwellian..
Ward Cunningham is a great role model. He's super-smart, darn clever, and just a really soothing sort of laid-back guy. He doesn't have to struggle with the alienate/suffer fools conundrum because he's aware enough to be learning something from the majority of his interactions with other people. If you can achieve that, you can conserve all the energy you'd waste swatting at fools.
I can do go for that for RoR; but Napster was a much bigger leap in its time than we give it credit for now, and the same for Bram/BT. The BitTorrent protocol was well done, even once P2P was far from an obscure idea.
Completely agree with you.

I think it is fair to see the 40B as simply saving the 60K or so jobs and little more. If a natural disaster took 60K lives, I do not think it will cause a prolonged national economic depression.

Likewise, I do not think adding 60K employed consumers will go a long way in fixing the current economic crisis.

Of course, saying that the 40B will "save" the jobs is in itself a big assumption. There is every chance that GM will run out of 40B and still shut down.
IMHO there is nothing here intrinsically better about the experience - what they seem to have done is simply take a good old Flash interface and ripped out the click and replaced it with mouseover events.

Sorry, but I think you have to go a few steps further if you really want to seamlessly eliminate the click (which begs the question: why?).

The UI was annoying - the same UI that I've run into for the new Sims game - an over-reliance on mouse-over events, popping menus in and out of existence based on minute, often accidental motion. You have no idea how hard it is to, say, buy a bed and choose the wood finish for your Sim, just because the UI sucks.
My current email and IM tools allow me to trivially keep legally sensitive information from getting intermingled with ordinary stuff in a way I'm not sure is possible with something like Wave so I'm not likely to use it any time soon or ever.

I don't really get why I would want to use Wave or what sort of thing I would have to be doing to want the functions it seems to provide. If I had to guess, I'd say the real market for this interface style would be things like interactive gaming chat platforms (e.g. xfire[1]), customer support applications (e.g. copilot[2]) or online education systems.

1- http://www.xfire.com/

2- http://www.copilot.com/
It's also true that some programmers are more productive collaborators than others. (In fact, some are effectively anti-collaborators -- less work gets done when they pitch into a project.) If you are in a collaborative enterprise, this might be something to consider.
David Heinemeier Hansson: http://www.loudthinking.com/about.html
The social center is also decided by a kind of marketplace.

With central control of a repository, you can have what amounts to an "irrigation rights empire" -- a totalitarian regime (perhaps with some democratic window dressing) based on one party's control over some sort of infrastructure.
San Francisco, if you can find somewhere cheap.
What? The Archos Jukebox had the same capacity as the first iPod and was released a year earlier.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archos_Jukebox_series

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ipod
The Google Wave client could exist independent of at least the federation part of the Wave Protocol, if Google didn't care about interoperability with 3rd parties.

That said, they're not stupid, of course, so they realized unless they make it open and bake in federation from the beginning they'll never get widespread adoption.

Now if Wave does become popular, Google will be in a pretty good position. They invented the thing so they are experts in it, and have a big head start over everyone else with things like the Spelly and Rosy robots, and likely a more scalable infrastructure than the reference implementation they plan to open source. They'll also have a lot of control over the protocol.

I'm not sure where I was going with that.
Yet it works in cat. So you can at least program the solution in C, compile it with cpp, and then use it from inside your C++ program.
Thank you...it is very strange and upsetting.
If this were Reddit, I'd be making a "yo dawg" joke right about now. But it isn't, so just pretend I said something anodyne about XUL or something.
Music That Lovers Find Most Appealing
Love is one of the most fabulous feelings of life. All of us cross this bridge at least once in our lifetime and some of us are fortunate enough to walk on this bridge all our life while some of us walk in and out of this feeling. When we are in love we do strange things, we sing, we dance, we paint, we write and we do things that we did not know that we are capable of; along with this all of us listen to good music. Music is such an integral part of love.
how old was he? How come you don't see the guy's age listed in any of the stories covering this?
HN suggestion: A larger margin at the bottom of comment pages
Hacker News tends to generate interesting, long discussions, which is great. I read the first screenful, glance at the bottom of the window and see that comments reach all the way to the bottom, so I hit the spacebar to bring up another page and keep reading, and the process repeats.

However, on the last page, the comments still reach all the way to the bottom of the screen, and I wind up hitting the spacebar a couple of times before I figure out I've actually come to the end of the page rather than my browser being sluggish or whatever.

If there were an inch or so of the white page background below the last comment, I think that would work wonderfully.
There's plenty which will be worth lifting off the surface of Mars, but not to head back to Earth. Mars gravity is only 38% of Earth's -- low enough that we can build a space elevator there with materials we have had for years. Even without that, it's still much, much cheaper to get to the asteroids and the rest of the Solar System from there.

Mars has a nearly 24 hour day/night cycle and solar flux suitable for growing plants. Mars has also had the same sorts of geologic processes that created many of the mineral deposits on Earth. Basically, Mars is a treasure trove of resources to enable the cost-effective human settlement of the rest of the Solar System.

And the rest of the solar system will get settled. There is simply too much military advantage to be gained from being up there as opposed to down here. Ultimately, the amount of resources and energy that a solar system-wide space-faring civilization will be able to control will be a couple of orders of magnitude larger than what we can easily acquire on Earth. Therefore, some Earthside societies will try to settle Mars and exploit the resources up there, and it's only a matter of time until at least one succeeds.

However, these attempts of Earth societies to colonize space will ultimately fail to create good copies of their parent societies and will instead give rise to an entirely new society, which will generate many new innovations much as the American colonies failed to remain under Britain and eventually gave rise to much of the innovation of the Industrial Revolution.

Whether or not we're mostly made of meat by that time -- I'm not sure how relevant that is, really.

http://baetzler.de/humor/meat_beings.html
What successful, widely-used project was created entirely by one lone genius?

This position is a little oxymoronic since anything successful and widely-used must benefit from the non-zero amount of direct and indirect community feedback. Every project exists in relation to others and if one is superior in some way it's often because the creator decided to improve on something they liked or disliked in another system.
Randomized Algorithms is one of those books that frustrated, challenged, and ultimately enlightened me. I have at least one friend who I know worked closely with him and always had kind words to say. A sad loss.
I chatted with him on several occasions over the past ten years or so and would probably have guessed him to be in his late 50s. He was one of the really nice guys out there and will be sorely missed.
Summary: Want to succeed on a frontier? Do it frugally, so it pays for itself! Best way to do it frugally? -- involve the free market as much as you can!
The technology was built by Sergey Brin and Larry Page as part of their studies at Standford. Google did not just buy their page rank algorithms.
Google identifies the top ten malware sites
Aha, I have uncovered it. There are two problems. One is that apparently std::locale is horribly, horribly broken in the C++ standard library for Mac OS X. You can work around this by using C, like Real Programmers. The other problem is that without some form of setlocale, the standard library will run in "C" or "POSIX" mode, which can do nothing at all interesting with Unicode. By running setlocale, or by running std::locale::global (std::locale ("")) on a platform with a C++ library that works, it will print appropriately.

Interestingly on my Ubuntu box, before I put the std::locale in it was printing "I have EUR100 to my name.", which is a pretty cool fallback.
To be truly fair to Bram, he had the insight to take an existing marginally working p2p system that he had previously been employed to develop and strip it down to the essential components needed to shift bits quickly. Innovation, not invention.

I definitely agree with you on Napster. I am less sure about RoR. It was a a very nice improvement over existing systems, but how much of that was DHH genius and how much was simply due to Ruby providing a better platform upon which to build this particular framework I do not know. It was definitely better than existing alternatives in other scripting languages, but I was not a part of the Ruby world at the time and have no idea where the initial RoR work fit in to the whole Ruby ecosystem at the time.
There is also the aspect of trying to catch up to Google, even if it isn't a great investment they may see it as there last real chance to catch Google. Customers probably wouldn't respond well to another rebranding in future.

Theres also the emotional aspect, you'd imagine Steve Ballmer would like nothing more than to take Google down a couple of pegs.
\u20ac is not UTF8; it's UCS2. If you set the locale to UTF8 then you need to printf with UTF8 and not UCS2 (or UTF16).
(1) $6K+(N×$6K) ? As if. Now $6MM+(N×$6MM).

(2) Bye-bye Ramen, hello Roman holiday!

(3) Build defensible advantages. Like, a castle with a moat to keep away all the crooks, scammers and favor-seekers. ("Make something people want to break into, but can't.")
In Linus' git talk, he says that he finds creating different tarballs is much better version control than using CVS.
In India, generally B Tech degree is completed when the student is aged 21. Since he did it in 1983, he should be 47. Just a guess.
this must be a real shocker to a lot of people since he was still at work today. I wonder why there isn't any explanation at all about this. My guess is that it's a courtesy to family and friends to be informed first.
Thanks for the feedback... how would you name our service then? or at least : how would you describe it now that you know what it is?
Arf... good point!
Books as Software (2007)
From Digg: http://digg.com/security/astalavista_com_Hacked_2

http://romeo.copyandpaste.info gives an idea about anti-security movement...
Have you tried pricegrabber.com?
Send Rakhi to India, Rakhi to India, Rakhi Gifts to India
My foot.
VirtualDatingAssistants.com Lets You Outsource Your Online Dating Life
Actually, I want to point out that "realtime" doesn't mean "instantaneous"... accordint to Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real-time_computing):

In computer science, real-time computing is the study of hardware and software systems that are subject to a "real-time constraint"

We're committing at improving our detection time, but right now, we can only guarantee 15minutes.
I thought I was the only one.

A footer would do as well.
I see your point, if only the wealth was more equally shared it would be a lot better place.
2009 TechFellow Awards: The Winners
Vidoop had been playing for a while in the identity space and was still flirting with it at this time. Part of the entire reason of going to SXSW was to figure out opportunities in that space going forward, or whether or not we should just focus on our security product. (I went there as part of bacn.com but helped out with some Vidoop stuff)

Just another sign of poor focus.
It’s a startup, not a spreadsheet
Pushing Daisies Season 2 on DVD and Blu-Ray
Finally, Pushing Daisies Season 2 on DVD will be out in the market soon. I`m glad the long wait will be over, I can watch it over and over again!
All strings in a physical machine are in some encoding. I/O almost always requires transcoding, except in the unlikely event that the destination encoding happens to match the chosen language's in-memory encoding.

If you create a wide-char string (C++'s most obvious candidate for full Unicode-level support), and print it out to the console using wcout, the programmer should reasonably expect the library to perform transcoding as necessary to match the destination (providing things are configured correctly).

The fact that \u20ac maps to a code point in UCS2 or UTF-16 when encoding a wide string in text format for the compiler to read, is all but irrelevant. So long as the final data at runtime is in a valid encoding that matches its type, the runtime library should handle everything from there.
Once DNSSEC is implemented, this would probably be a lot more secure and easier to implement.

EDIT: I think there is an RFC for this already: http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4398
Yes you're completely right that I may have that problem with other hosting companies as well. And that's why it's so important to be able to move if need be.

My project is not any more on shaky ground than Google's own business. Search engines or any service that lets users upload or link content is prone to cease and desist letters. Only very recently there was a post here on HN where someone complained that 6 tweets were uploaded to a competitor's site by a user.

And then there's Google's user authentication service, which is very convenient. I can't think of a way to migrate that one without asking all my users to create new accounts and provide their google login password so I can check whether they are the legitimate owner of that account.
or `cat cat.c` to see how those cats did it.
Alex Tabarrok on how ideas trump crises