skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I love this part of your question, should he 'try it or not?'

I have to ask, why would he not? You said he's already a good programmer, has lots to add, he wants to be more involved, so I'd say, yes he should try it.

It isn't as if he is going to loose his programming skills. I actually think that depending on the structure of the project/company he is working with, a product manager who is also a great programmer can have a very positive effect on managing less experienced programmers.

If he finds he isn't very good at it, or doesn't like it, is there anything stopping him from going back to being a programmer?

When posed with a 'should I or shouldn't I' question, my default is always yes, unless I can come up with a good reason not to do it!
Not only is it voice recognition, but the microphone array determines the direction of the sound and correlates it to a body... so it knows exactly who is talking and where they are talking from. Pretty bad ass.
New WordPress Blog - Search Results - Yahoo Mail India
Wow. Microsoft, Yahoo, and Google have all spent obscene amounts of money and time building "special relationships" with the Chinese government, ostensibly with the hope of preventing this sort of thing.

Fat lot of good it's doing them. I expect that some, probably most, of these blocks will stay in effect for a while. The 60th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic is coming up this fall, so the authorities are busy creating a "harmonious society" in preparation.

FWIW, the mood here in Beijing is increasingly tense. Not a lot of fun.
I wonder how many of the dollars no longer being spent on these ads are being captured (as pennies) by Google (and perhaps startups?). I worked at a metro paper from 07-09, and the 2nd largest local ad seller was Google, with their local sales force of 0 (1st was the paper, with their sales force in the scores).
Beyond Email: Shareflow at Zenbe
That's probably the single best summary of the fundamentals of U.S. fiscal problems I've seen. I will keep this in mind to point people to when questions about government debt come up.

If you need to sum up the U.S. debt crisis in a single sentence, I would go with:

"This staggering amount breaks down to a $483,000 burden on every American household, or a $184,000 burden on every man, woman, child and newborn in this country."

It really sucks that each of my kids is already $184,000 in the hole, through no fault of their own.
I rather have ads in the feed.
I'd like to see how other advertising as a whole has changed over the same time period. Without that, I don't think the stat is too useful. Has all advertising dropped off a cliff, or has online advertising taken share away from newspapers?
A fair point, although I'd say it's highly dependent on the kind of product you're building, too, and who your audience is.

For instance, if you're selling enterprise products rather than consumer products, and you're selling them to a less communicative industry (like the construction industry, for example), you may find that there's a lot less "word of mouth" going on, so the fact that it's not just spreading completely by itself shouldn't necessarily discourage you...

Another point - you might need to reach a critical mass of users in order to be able to effectively improve the product using A/B testing and other techniques that rely on larger numbers... if so, it may be worth investing in marketing the product to build those numbers and then be able to make those improvements measurable and rapid.
Your comment adds less to an intelligent discussion than does the article you're calling a troll.

First, this isn't a troll. The guy posted a blog post on his own blog. He didn't post off-topic content to a thread and didn't try to provoke an argument in an otherwise civil conversation. The only possible way that you can characterize this as a troll is that he uses some crude language, and says some things that are unpopular on HN. But say what you will about the content, he didn't try to make you read it.

Second, the guy has a point. I've had a rant like this building in my craw for a long time, and this guy nailed nearly every point I've wanted to make. From a software engineering perspective, web development is in the dark ages. What's worse, it's a luddite process -- a totally self-made exile from the benefits of 50 years of progress: Type safety is shunned. Language efficiency is ignored. Data structures beyond the hash table are exotic and rare (and worse, I've met more than one "professional" web developer who couldn't tell me the difference between open and closed hashing!)

I understand very well that programmer time is more valuable than computer hardware, and that the speed/development time trade-off is often biased toward development time. But if you ask me, what was once an intelligent guideline is now becoming a cult. It is possible to do rapid development in a compiled language, and there are some really good reasons -- beyond execution speed -- to revisit the idea.
You're attacking the weaknesses of C, not the weaknesses of compiled languages for web platforms.
Ask HN: Review my startup - Chords!
Winamp plugin that is able to extract chords from any mp3 on your playlist. It is very good in that. You could edit missed chords if needed in plain text file.

You could see chords and guitar tabs synchronized to a song and even hear chords mixed to a song.

http://chords.fm

Thoughts?
Apple's Original Business Plan and Offering Memorandum
Terry Childs back in court
i'm not understanding the optimism. i'm sure natal will be another major step forward like the wii was. what it will not be is a quantum leap. the video was clearly ridiculous.
My style is is a combination of both this and what is written in the article. I don't whats the best, but this seems to work for me !
Ask HN: Building a workstation
What's your favorite motherboard / processor (and other components) at the moment for building a fast, cheap linux workstation? Any recommendations or warnings?
Wow...that's awesome, and I'm especially excited about the mission of his foundation. That said, this really bugged me:

Kurt Vonnegut once told a story about seeing Joseph Heller at a wealthy hedge-fund manager's party at a beach house in the Hamptons. Casting his eye around the luxurious setting, Vonnegut said, "Joe, doesn't it bother you that this guy makes more in a day than you ever made from Catch-22?" "No, not really," Heller said. "I have something that he doesn't have: I know the meaning of enough."

I hate stuff like that. Heller wasn't giving up 90% of his possessions and living in a shack eating beans and rice, which would be "enough" for many people in the world. It's all relative, ultimately. Just because someone with wealth chooses to live what you consider to be an opulent lifestyle doesn't mean they don't know what enough is. Billionaires have such a staggering amount of wealth that they can give 95% of it away and still live an incredibly comfortable and extravagant lifestyle. I like to think about Gates and Buffett here, both of whom will ultimately probably give away over $100 billion, but who both live very comfortable lifestyles, Gates much more so than Buffett, but even Buffett flies around in a private jet.

/rant
I always enjoy this series, but I've never actually built one:

http://cr.yp.to/hardware/build-20090123.html
There is no need to pair program all the time. Like many things in XP, adopting them all fully all the time is overkill. We don't do pure XP. We don't do pure Agile/Scrum. We do what works for our company and with our personalities and with our projects.

Pair programming works on our team very well in specific sets of circumstances (e.g. something has to be built by a certain deadline) and by combining forces (and sharing the pain) you improve your odds of getting it done and getting it done in a quality manner.

I hate the term "driving" as it applies to pair programming. "Can I drive now?". Argh.
Twitter's been unblocked: http://twitter.com/MissXu/status/2004993287
I think your point is exacerbated by the fact that it's hard to get web UIs "right". I was critical of languages like python and ruby until I had to do the frontend for some company code. Box looks like it needs to be shifted a few pixels right? Modify code, compile, check. Logo looks better with an offset? Modify code, compile, check. Writing in a scripting language makes it just Modify, check.

You just can't do that in compiled languages, and the compiled language of choice for the web-- Java --isn't known for blazing compilation speed. You'd probably also have to jar it up and copy the damn thing over, whereas psps could be modified in-place. I think this is something that compiled folks like me simply failed to grasp: all the things about scripting languages that make them orders of magnitude faster for developing, especially for the web.
It's a lot easier to get going on a project with a prototyping board. There are also many "shields" (daughterboards) which are designed to fit atop the Arduino: things like motor controllers, GPS modules, wireless ethernet cards, etc. Once a prototype has been worked out, the designer can then design their own circuit using standalone AVRs.
Hacker News Top Headline Jetpack for Firefox
I was about to say
I connected a PS2 barcode reader to a Sanguino, and programmed it to store the scans in memory, then dump them when sent a specific serial command. This allows me to scan a pile of books for LibraryThing when I'm not at my computer.
Move Over, Amazon? Google Aims to Sell e-Books
After playing with Jetpack, I decided to have a go at making one for the HN community. Hopefully you'll find it useful.
On a JSP server with a complex framework that is no longer being actively developed. To me that's the same thing as being abandoned.

It's like this: A guy tells you he will ferry you to England for free. Half way there, he says - hmm, actually, I've changed my mind. I'll take the engine, but here are two paddles - see ya!
Holy fucking shit.
I've been ignoring links to coding horror for a long time. I clicked on this one because it seemed to be targeted to people like me, and I wondered if he was showing some self-awareness, or perhaps planning to take the blog in a new direction. For those who don't want to waste their time, the answer is "no".
E-commerce - is the next wave about to break?
How to run a java project from the command line
Maybe he has saved time for the real work with wordpress.
I'm using mine to replace the ignition system on my motorcycle (1979 Honda CX500). The original system is a lovely piece of electrical engineering, but is prone to stator coil and capacitor failure (respectively, by heat and age). The Arduino will allow proper ignition timing to be maintained even as three of four timing coils fail.
Rubberduckzilla - cool augmented reality game
I usually sit down and write something right away. As soon as I get stuck, then I think without coding, so to speak.

The unfortunate byproduct of this is that my code ends up looking very confusing, even to me, and I have to do some major cleanup on it before I let anyone else look at it.
I really like the idea, but don't use Winamp. Most of the things along this line that I've tried are pretty bad, so I'm not sure I'm willing to download two pieces of software to see if this one is different. What about an online service where I can upload the song in FLAC or mp3 and get the tab back?
Does anyone else occasionally spend an unreasonable amount of time deciding how to name a variable ? :)
Economy forces software vendors to change pricing and licensing strategies
The controls are rough, but it's a very cool concept.
From a western point of view, the concept of "Hinduism" seems extremely broad. A few hundred years ago, Catholics and Protestants routinely warred against each other, and many present-day Christians still deny that other self-identified Christians are "really" Christian. When hatred between Christians and even Jews started to ebb, conservatives had to invent the bogus "Judeo-Christian" identity to create a new viable "us/them" distinction and revitalize religious xenophobia in the US. When an American such as myself looks at the amazing variety of Hindu beliefs, his first thought is to suspect that Hinduism, too, is a political invention to unite a diverse group of people against the "other." I don't know of any evidence for this theory, though, and the idea of Hinduism as a common tradition seems to be pretty old. (Hinduism is certainly used to foster us/them thinking by the BJP now, but they seem to be capitalizing on the Hindu identity more than creating it.)
Unfortunately, the internet won't always be completely superior. The advantage of newspapers is that you can always just not look at the ads, or at least not pay attention to them. Eventually everything online will be monetized, and more likely than not, the ads will be more intrusive simply because they can be more intrusive, and hence more effective.
InvestrorDayCEE (IDCEE 2009) conference preparation stage announce
a conference for Central and Eastern European region where startups will meet investors - expo, panels, comptition with a big prize fund
RubyMine 1.0 Released
I paid for a sizably more expensive ($60+) kit with one (or more properly, had one paid for for me for Christmas) because it's a ready to go kit with a USB-serial interface, some other support circuitry, and firmware in it already.

I suppose if I ever blow up the microcontroller I'll buy an unprogrammed one and reprogram + install it, but by far the compelling thing about it is that you get all of the parts in one box and can start tinkering on Christmas day. If you just get the MC you have to get a breadboard, USB support guts, and any other stuff separately before you can start using it.
Why should this be terrifying and not an example of us outgrowing something quaint and ridiculous? Printing yesterday's news every night on a ton of paper, physically delivering it to people, and then having them throw it away is supposed to be an immortal business model?
Code reviews are overrated
Ask HN: Need feedback on startup social learning site
The brief description of this little Arduino project why did was enough to get me started: http://twitter.com/_why/status/1065757843

I'd love to see it in person. Someone made and documented a similar idea here: http://www.urbanhonking.com/ideasfordozens/2009/02/the_git_b...
I am having a devil of a time figuring out what that graph actually is. I think the percentage is "how much less revenues are than the same quarter last year", but I'm still not 100% on that. It's a very strange number to graph quarterly, especially without more clearly labeling it.
I've worked on a webapp under serious load, and I think he's right.

You're correct that database queries and resource bottlenecks are the usual problems for web application scaling, but even taking that into account, I've had more than one problem that was caused by the simple fact that Ruby is a dog of a language. Python is better, but only just so. Perl is faster than both, but still nowhere near as fast as a C++ program.

But let's ignore execution speed, since one can make a reasonable argument that even the slowest scripting language can saturate the network I/O on modern hardware. I think I'd still consider using a compiled language, because the type-safety and compile-time guarantees of a statically typed language would go a long way toward eliminating a huge class of silly bugs that we deal with on a daily basis. That's developer time in the bank.
E3 2009: Lionhead’s Project Milo Tech Demo
At work so I can't actually demo. However, the video looked nice. One thing I noticed is that the tabs correctly displayed minor chords while the text simply said B or F# (implying major). Additionally, how good is it at picking up alternate tunings (i.e. down a half step a la hendrix) or obscure jazz chords? I suppose I can just wait until I get home to try it out, so maybe I'll report back then...
But ads online have a limit to how intrusive they can be - if it detracts so much that it removes the value of the content, people won't consume the content at all. It's the same reason there aren't newspapers with one story per page and just ads around it.

And online there's AdBlock :)
I'm not from Github, but the blog post says "Please keep in mind that FI is priced competitively with other internal code management solutions and is well over the cost of our most-expensive hosted plan." Their most expensive hosted plan is the Giga at $200/month.

http://github.com/blog/441-launch-github-firewall-install
The VisualWorks Smalltalk Server Pages framework already does this.

SSP results in web pages as compiled machine language.

The HTML file is translated into a new Smalltalk method, the tags become Smalltalk message sends, and the HTML between the dynamic tags just become accesses into an Array. Because Array access is optimized and JITed as machine code, the only message sends are due to the dynamic tags. When the webpage/method is JITed, you have a web page compiled into machine code.
negative as in CNC, Chengdu.

I observed twitter has been trying to change IP for at least three times, but it's a URL block. Any port 80 TCP request that has a twitter.com between GET and HTTP/1.1 will be blocked.
"It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves - the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public - has stopped being a problem." -Clay Shirky

http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/03/newspapers-and-thinking...
Thank you for adding so much to the discussion and making Hacker News a great place.
"No mention is made of tactical possibilities involving mirrors, reflective sunglasses etc."
I'm sorry, but this is very basic information and probably not suitable for the audience here. Running 'java -h' explains as much.
Cool, I'll be sure to stop by.
It's a bit crippled.
How Washington blew GM’s bankruptcy
That'll teach businesses to play nice with dictatorships...
Extreme Programming works well for debugging code (not development)
Does your editor of choice not support rudimental word boundary search (\b in regexp terms) ?
I guess so if you're a newspaper. :\
I'm not entirely convinced that a public body would be better at determining what should be visible than a private company. Both have their pros and cons. Private companies will tend to look at what's best for their users in order to maximise profits. Public bodies will tend to look at what's appropriate politically.

Considering how corrupt most political bodies are (see all the various lobbying efforts and other expenses scandals) and considering the importance of search, I'm not sure that a public body can be entrusted with it. It's too important to screw it up in the way that governments tend to.
I agree with you that some models and markets have retention and referral as a much bigger priority than others.

Did you cite the construction industry as something that was a best guess, or do you have particular insight into the insularity of companies in that field?

As far as needing "larger numbers" for split testing, you might be surprised at how few samples you need to achieve an acceptable confidence level for most effect sizes. It is less than most people think (of course I can't give numbers because I don't know the effect size or confidence level that you are looking for.)
oops... "many modules"...
Most of the coders are used to work solely with an IDE, without ever knowing how things work in the background. I know this is something basic for people that know how an IDE works, but most of them don't.
Is that graph percent decline from a baseline? Year on year decline? Quarter to quarter?
Your question may infer more than you may have meant.

Yes, I occasionally spend an unreasonable amount of time deciding how to name a variable.

But what is "unreasonable". If 30 minutes of agonizing over a name (and a standard) saves me 6 hours of debugging next month, was it really unreasonable?
ok, recognizing burndown doesn't seem to be a problem. But what about overcoming it?

I have come through this process several times in my life. Still I do not know how I have been able to recover....and here I am again...
Using Twitter and FB Statuses as Input for your Web App
My company deals with the construction industry, and it is not a very tech-enabled industry (despite the fact that they use many very advanced piece of software to design buildings).
I won $10k of that $1 billion a few months ago. The Peter G. Peterson Foundation and mtvU hosted a video game design contest and I won. You can play the game at http://debtski.com

It's a game about personal fiscal responsibility. At the time, I didn't realize how much press the game would get, but it picked up traction pretty quickly. The highlight for me was when the game was a featured story on the Yahoo! homepage for ~45 minutes.
A deal, like everything else in life, should be as simple as possible and no simpler.
From what I can see, major chords are displayed in uppercase, minor chords in lowercase. e.g., E for E major; e for E minor.
That's pretty cool. Have you considered making the design open source?
> I think I'd still consider using a compiled language, because the type-safety and compile-time guarantees of a statically typed language would go a long way toward eliminating a huge class of silly bugs that we deal with on a daily basis.

Not all compiled languages are statically typed.

> That's developer time in the bank.

And the time spent in the edit, compile, test, run, cycle? I'd think there's more developer time in the bank if I can edit, test, run.
Not really. The shopping basket (this was before everyone settled on "cart") was written in C, but the shopping basket wasn't the back end of the rest of the system, just one of several components that ran in parallel.
> Your question may infer more than you may have meant.

Of course, it does. It is a simpler version of "Do you care enough to write elegant code ?".
I was under the impression that while C3 wasn't finished when the project was terminated it was used productively after only two years.

Also, it the project replaced one that had tried to make something work for even longer, without producing anything working at all.

Also, I remember it that Kent Beck thought the projects ending had nothing to do with the performance of it.
Linkbait-ish title. It's more like: "Why Extreme Programming doesn't take hold."
It will absolutely be open source. I just need to complete it first. :)
i think a discussion of the next wave of e-commerce is incomplete without talking about the role of social. amazon stands firm against in the rise of zappos because it is more social, more reviews deliver more relevant/engaging content that lead to sales.

one the other side you have threadless, offering a highly social and interactive buying experience that no other retailer can match.

additionally add in winelibrary.tv for a diff kind of social, where a daily interactive show and lots of personal brand set the tone for a fun buying experience.

e-commerce is in fact experiencing many new waves, partly due to the massive efforts by small software firms building free or cheap social apps, and smart e-commerce sites that are leveraging these platforms to connect with customers. while web 2.0 has monitization issues and an unhealthy reliance on boring Ads, e-commerce has a lot to gain from web 2.0 and a direct way to turn all that social activity in cash. exciting times indeed.