skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's rare in my experience that anyone believes they really are the best developer ever. Generally programmers seem to be a pretty humble bunch, I think. Perhaps because the nature of our work is such that, in a sense, bugs are there because of our own personal failings and mistakes. We deal with that all day, every day. How could anyone, when faced with such an ever-present reminder of their own deficiencies, honestly think of themselves as the best?

(Although in thinking about this, perhaps maintenance programmers are most prone to this as their task is largely to fix bugs in other people's code - not their own. It'd be easier to fall into that trap, I imagine.)

I suspect that most "I'm the best ever" talk is just a game. A form of "blowing off steam." All the developers I know do that at least some of the time. Everyone knows better, though. It's all tongue in cheek stuff and just for fun. Often it ends after a few rounds of ludicrous build up to the point where the entire universe itself would have imploded if it wasn't for me... :)
We need a Washington Post article for this?
Wow. Is "The Princess Bride" humor not allowed here or something? :P
Save yourself the time - he sums up at the end of this fluff by saying, "In my next post I'll examine the real reasons we don't document our software systems."
The Internet can't kill newspapers, radio already did it in the 1930s
It annoys me as much when they don't bother making a character encoding declaration and there are placemarkers all over.
I've long wondered why the DARPA challenge for automated cars is necessary when the code could be tested using video games for orders of magnitude less money.
Ask HN: How do you manage keyword ranking history?
I've struggled with this for a while - how (i.e. what tools/techniques) do people manage their keyword ranking history for their main search terms?

Example: I want to track my rank history in a table with columns, "SearchEngine", "PositionInOrganicSearchResults", "GooglePageRank". What tools, other than Mechanical Turk or other manual means, exist to track this info that won't run us afoul of the search engine's TOS? I don't want any black-hat software - I just want to figure out how to track that info in a legitimate manner.

I'd like to check keywords/phrases on a minimum of 100 major terms, 300 minor terms, and 1000+ very minor terms.

Thanks for any advice
Precious few of your examples would seem to me to be a 'loss' of something, most of them would simply change the theater we're operating in.

Copyright is not all bad, but that is not the issue here. The issue is whether the sum total of the effect of the existence of copyright is a good thing or a bad thing.

My suspicion is that it is a net negative.
This looks very interesting, something I need just at the moment. Anyone out there informed about legal issues enough to give an opinion on this, good or bad?
In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, however...
I really love the distinction made in the opening slides between a company's stated values and their "real values", which are shown through actions.

Dear Netflix: can you please open software development offices in NJ or NY? Please?
Who knows, sometimes being versed in the status-quo is a hindrance.
He doesn't have a chain connecting the pedals to the rear tire so its not really functional. Check out the video - he never pedals, and when he folds it you can see there is no chain.

You can't have a joint that changes the geometry between the rear hub and the pedals. On this bike there is a hinge and they end up being next to each other. On current folding bikes the hinge is forward of the pedals - the locking mechanism is usually the weak point, spend time improving that.
If I were told to write an article with that headline, the first sale would have marked the end of Phase #1. I'm not sure that I can fit everything else you need to do into only 5 phases left, but relabeling the first sale stage 0 is just cheesy.
Watch Kaminey Movie | Kaminey Movie 
Guddu and Charlie are brothers, born and raised in Dharavi, Asia's largest slum dwelling in the heart of the megalopolis, Mumbai. They also happen to be identical twins, in early twenties, hoping to leave the squalor behind and move into a life of prosperity and dignity. But the similarity ends here. Guddu works as a trainee in a small NGO firm in the city. He hopes to climb up to the top of the corporate ladder. He wants to be a bona fide member of the burgeoning Indian middle class. His career has only just begun though and the road to bourgeoisie is both long and arduous. Yet Guddu is at it. He is honest, diligent and careful. Especially careful. Charlie makes a living hedging bets at the race course. He moves around the plush hordes of the rich and famous at the races. For him this is just a way to make quick money and he dreams of becoming a legitimate bookie one day. Charlie is street smart, wily and brave. And only for himself. http://free-bollywood-movie.blogspot.com
If you don't understand the mistakes of the past, you're bound to repeat them. This is especially true if you haven't implemented a real-esque kernel already. Pushing someone away from a tutorial that does a great job of teaching the concepts while telling them to do something original is just ludicrous.

OS development is already difficult enough, why make it harder? For every ten people that read and follow this and decide to make the Next Big OS (TM) following Unix concepts, you might get one that sees something bigger.
Ask HN: Seeking Comments: Holy Grail of Software 
I have created a test of my below Hypothesis @ www.arshu.com. Please note it is 0.1 version and
tested using Firefox only. Download if have .NET to run the whole site in your PC.

Hypothesis :

Complex software has to be done by assembling reusable components to have the following advantage. 1) High Productivity 2) High Flexibility/Changeability 3) Low Cost. This is how other Industries have managed complexity/productive and cost. Even Fast Food industries like KFC etc, assemble food instead of making food.

This is not my original thought, but I found this approach has been discussed even in mainframe era. I consider this as the Holy Grail of Software.

Loose Coupling/SOA/Struts/Spring/Dependency Injection are various approaches to acheive the above. I have seen Mashups/Popfly/SharePoint WebParts Framework implementing this type of approach even though it is not fully separating assembly and coding.

In connection with testing the above Hypothesis, I started working on a Framework where I can clearly separate Assembly and coding.

I have recently started work on mini ERP like workflow and document management product for Architecture Industry and going to use this Framework to really find the benefit.

In the mean time I would like to hear any comments from others. Do you think this Hypothesis is valid. Have you come across any other way to separate assembly and coding.
"Bad - Within my first week, I noticed three "good bye" emails, none of which were voluntary.

Great - All of my coworkers are amazing. It's really satisfying to not be the smartest guy in the room."

You might want to reconsider the "bad" label on your first line item, because I suspect it's strongly correlated with the "great" label on your second one.
I've run into a number of writers whose stated goal was to write better than anyone who wrote faster. Using that definition, they could all be "best".

What definition of "best" are we using?
Pardon the copy editing, but let's not make up words when the exact word you want already exists. The word is "humility", not "humbleness".
I was going to read your article, but the picture of a blowup doll makes it hard to do so during work.
I did not see him pedling at all, deal breaker if it's just a scooter. Looks like a prototype that will never get further, the cost for that many high quality hinges will put the manufacturing price way past a reasonable price point.
Code is important the same way good accounting practices are important -- it's a vehicle to get you to where you want to go. It's a tool, nothing more and nothing less.

Where you want to go is a place where you are doing things people like in return for money. That means that you need to 1) find out what people want, 2) make that, and 3) tell enough people that some percentage of them will make this trade you have planned.

Coding is a part of #2. And because it deals with known environments and logic, it's the easiest of all of them.
Is it time to start treating posts about points like political posts?
Keep an extra $500 ready cash in my top right cabinet drawer along with my pet Australian funnel-web spider. He's usually pissed off and hungry so, before making a withdrawal, I always toss in a few grasshoppers and wait until he's busy.

Not sure if any BGs ever figured out what the grasshopper cage was all about!8-))
The future of fabrication is here: Shapeways announces stainless steel printing
crude simulations don't invalidate theories. i hate anti-scientific quips like that.
"The problem, he said, was that robots could not fulfil two of the basic tenets of warfare: discriminating friend from foe, and "proportionality", determining a reasonable amount of force to gain a given military advantage."

That is true for autonomous robots, but we are currently not there yet. And if the choice is between the UAV overhead with cameras and sensors on the target firing guided missiles, or the UAV overhead with a camera and someone firing artillery at the target from a few miles away, the UAV is more accurate and less likely to cause collateral damage.

He also talks about how they are further distancing the soldiers from battle. Not really, if you are a normal pilot you drop the weapons on the target and get the hell out of there, and don't see really any of it except on film later because you are moving so fast. The UAV operators keep the UAV overhead and are watching before, during, and after the attack much more closely than pilots. It turns out it can be more emotionally damaging than manned flight. Especially because of the lack of danger for you, it triggers different emotions.
All I can say is sorry. Yeah, the technology is my creation although Google doesn't use my old company's technology anymore (long story). I always tried to educate users with the proper way of implementing and using IP targeting. Doesn't mean they ever listened.
Python vs Ruby, slightly more in-depth
The problem I hear you describing is "I'm not sure if I can make a sound business out of this product idea." And your solution of "get a partner" seems rather flawed to me. I think it's just an excuse that a bunch of people have made up because it's easy to find another guy that you can sell your vision to and get him to get on board.

Whereas, what you are really looking for in a great "partner" is really a "customer" that is willing to pay!

Because think about it, if your real problem is the question of whether you can create a real business, then wouldn't finding that first customer that is literally willing to pay you for your idea (monetarily or through time and advice) a much better avenue?

On top of that, there is also that assumption that your partner will have the necessary skills to somehow solve you "do I have enough of a business" problem; which isn't a guarantee either! Technically, you're both going to be dumb shits.

At the end of it, I think failures and co-relation to # of founders is completely wrong. It all comes down to whether you have the discipline to think about operating a business, and the ability to a) understand your weaknesses and b) find leverage in compensating for it.
Now, for both you and Nico... ask yourself whether you (as a 'Hacker') are representative for 'most internet users in your country'. I think a website should be easiest in use for the biggest group of users.

As for me: I can get annoyed by behaviour like this but I'll always remind myself I'm not a 'regular internet user'.

As for most people I know: A lot have a dutch localization for windows and a dutch localization for Firefox/Chrome/IE. Quite a few (about 30%) have an english localization for their browsers (either because they have an english localization for windows or because they like 'consistent menus across all applications'.

I do agree with the author that geolocation should not be the first choice (cookies should be) but as a second choice it's better than the 'Accept-Language' header.
You can always use http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/
"Since we’re spending so much time and money to promote this phrase, we just want to make sure someone doesn’t say we can’t use it."

That seems like a reasonable argument. Also, IANAL but if I'm not mistaken just because somebody has a trademark for something doesn't mean that it's necessary enforceable.
What have we learned?

Activism is pointless!
I was expecting this to be about digital signatures and was slightly disappointed when I found out it wasn't the case.

Silly me for assuming a technical issue would be addressed on Hacker News.
Spotify Closing New Financing At €200M Valuation
Right. I had a one man startup and it worked great. You need the right business to start with.
WeFi’s Directory Nearly 30 Million WiFi Hotspots Strong, Raises More Funding
A good article, although I would have preferred some editing down on the assembly example. Most readers who bother to read through it are probably somewhat already on the SQL path, so parts are long-winded.

I know it's more of an intro to the "thinking in SQL" idea, but once you throw in the query optimization stuff, my experience is a little knowledge goes a long way.

In general, if the underlying relational model has been designed instead of thrown together, maybe even with some appropriate indexing, SQL developers shouldn't spend much time worrying about optimizing queries.

My main point is that usually, a sub-optimal query is just fine. Yes, you should understand how to identify your really bad queries using whatever tools your RDBMs provides, but I've always found that you have a very small number of problematic queries are the runtime monsters. And in that class of bad queries, you're usually looking at table scans run amok.

More important is that most developers still lack exposure to really using SQL. In the article, there is a simple query that the author identifies as bad and a few lines later shows a shorter (and more optimal) piece of code that is functionally equivalent. The real problem here is not that a RDBMS optimizer will struggle with the first query, but rather why a developer wouldn't automatically write the second version?

I've worked pretty extensively with Other People's Code (SQL code that is) and almost all the problems I've encountered seem to relate more to developer ignorance of SQL and bad underlying table design or indexing.
I was just toying with such an idea and wondering why that wasn't thought before. Use webkit as the base GUI widget tied with Python/Ruby/your_favorite_lang and you get:

* Truly cross-platform GUI on major OSes.

* Smoother transition if your app needs to move on web.

* Pretty looking UI's. 5 years ago, I'd prefer VB/Delphi/.NET [1] for building state of the art UI's (backed by some commercial packages) but today the scene has been completely changed. Hard to catch up with JQuery and alike when it comes to good looking UI's with the tools above.

Downsides? Having a fully blown JS interpreter working aside and a few megabytes bigger installations? Well, I'd say, way to go boy!

Glad to see someone actually working on this idea. I hope they don't make the mistake of setting a high price for entry which would unavoidably push it into being another niche framework. Best of the luck!

[1] and good luck on Linux!
My boss is an ex programmer, gear freak, award winning CEO, and a very successful entrepreneur. They do exist and can be awesome to work for.
If this is at all like the author makes it out to be, then it is terrifying.

How could such a scheme be put in place without an uproar? What family would seriously allow cameras to be placed in their home?
I don't consider that quip anti-scientific at all. I take it as a reminder that you must always test your theories against reality, because the ways that reality and theory differ might be greater than you realized.

To address your original question, the realities of controlling an actual car are probably the hard problems. Dealing with things such as the inertia of the car and tires slipping on the road are probably both required to solve the problem, and difficult to simulate accurately. Simulations only simulate what we know about. It's often the things we didn't anticipate that make the difference between success and failure.
Apologies for crossing the first rule of HN (The first rule of HN: do not talk about HN on HN) but there seems to be no other good spot to have a discussion about an idea like this.

What would you suggest I do instead ?
>> "When programmers develop 'for fun' we write documentation."

That's because they get something out of it. Namely, people won't use undocumented software and the authors want their software to be used.

In a corporate situation we don't document our software if we don't have to because we don't care (usually) whether or not people use it. If the company cares, it will force engineers to write documentation and we will do it because we don't want to get fired.
Build Your Own PDP-11.
The Daily Express is an unreliable tabloid and, as far as I can tell, they have completely fabricated the CCTV element of this story. There is no mention of CCTV in any government press release that I could find, nor in any other newspaper.

Here's a story from The Guardian (much more reliable and respectable), reporting on the initial introduction of this scheme in 2007: http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2007/apr/12/socialexclusio...

And more recently - http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2009/jul/22/youth-justice-... - The Guardian report on the expansion of the scheme, which is what the Wired and Daily Express articles are about.

The idea is simply that, at the point where problem families would normally be prosecuted or have their kids taken away by social workers, they are given an alternative which will hopefully be better for everyone involved. They are not spied on; rather, they move "into dedicated residential units with round the clock supervision by social care workers, providing support, parenting advice and counselling. There is no legal compulsion on the problem families to live in the specialist units but those that do can avoid permanent eviction from council housing, prosecution for antisocial behaviour, or their children being taken into care."

It sounds more like a hospital than a prison; rehabilitation, not punishment.

Wired clearly had some fun with the article, but it's important to clarify how inaccurate it is.
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I think there is a difference in targetting the UI to the browser settings of the user and displaying different content.

I'm all for the first but really do not like the second.

And no, I'm probably not representative, but then again, everybody is a 'niche of one'.

That's why I'm all for empowering the user.
try clicking the picture
Looks like I can view the package contents of your Twitter example app and see all the source. This may not be desirable for people trying to write a cross-platform app which they can also sell. Any way to close-source the final product?
Breaking news from the best newspapers in the world
International news, features and analysis from Americas, Europe, South Asia, Asia-Pacific, Africa and the Middle East.
None, but as in any case like this, nobody giving a damn about this will consider themself antisocial. So there may even be a few supporters. After some time, the boundaries will be defined newly and the uproar will come, of course then it's too late...
80% of businesses fail

Wasn't there an article on HN a couple months back showing this to be a myth?
Crude simulations may or may not invalidate theories, but they're notoriously bad at weeding out ultimately inviable lines of investigation. The raw, real world is messy and unpredictable in a way a simulation can never be, and until something from the DARPA Challenge or its ilk can handle meatspace, we got no business trusting meat with it.

Not to say simulations are bad things; they're just of limited utility. Beyond that point, it does get expensive. I think that's part of the reason for the Challenge in the first place.
It's not paranoia if they really are out to get me.
What makes you assume that blindly copying Unix is necessarily the easiest way to learn OS building?
My favorite Slashdot comment on this subject matter was:

"Every developer wants to think of themselves like House, M.D. where if they left the company it would fall apart. In reality, everyone is replaceable and if you got hit by a bus today in three months the company will have completely recovered."
Building the vehicles with the associated sensor and control systems were just as important as the AIs controlling I suppose.
The First Picture on the Web
let me put it another way then.

can the darpa challengers code EVEN handle a simulation? if not then why waste money going ahead with the full project?
use http://www.google.com/ncr instead.
Agree! I think this is yet another article that is spreading the fallacy that a "one man startup" is bound for failure.

This person (although intelligent) is not being nearly self-reflective enough in realizing his actual faults... e.g. he didn't release early, he didn't test the market, basically, he turned his business into a "science fair project."

I think the root cause of this bad outcome for him is his failure to truly understand his own limitations and finding a way to get leverage to compensate for it (e.g. hiring a salesman). THIS DOES NOT MEAN that just by getting a co-founder, all of this would have been solved! No! It just means that you need to understand the basics of business!
Yes, I've ported it to Ruby 1.9
When this is complete, you'll be able to byte compile all your Ruby code (and obscure all the JavaScript).
Ok, I can agree with that. So how do you feel about studying some of the more exotic variations on the theme (say, Plan 9) ?
Great: now the blowup doll is left-justified.
Ha, that's kinda true, I suppose. Sun gave MySQL the kiss of death.

I plug postgres constantly, myself, and I do want to see it get more popular and have a larger community of support (heh, although more users can mean the inverse of supportive community!). I do think it's a superior technology to MySQL, but every tool has its place. Would be good for more people to know the elephant is out there, and all the cool stuff it can do :-)
I like how a hefty fraction of the algorithms use neural networks so that they get better as they watch humans play.

The reason for this, of course, is that the developers just want a reason to play Mario :-)
I recently added affiliate tracking to the SaaS Rails Kit as a starting point for tracking payments to affiliates, etc. It's not a full, automated solution of course, but at least you can track it.

Generally you can't get that stored card data back out of the gateway. You basically have three options for this:
1. Just stick with the one you pick for the life of the app. This is the easiest. :)
2. When you switch keep track of which gateway has the info, maintaining two gateway accounts.
3. Ask users to re-enter their billing info when you switch.
That does the job, thanks.