skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I noticed when one of your articles was posted to reddit that there was no signature on it, it's nice to know who is behind them. Do you think you will ever publish these in book form? Your tips are blindingly accurate, it could definitely be a Code Complete III, updated to include functional and declarative programming.
I imagine relatively few of the bot tweets are actually spam—you have to follow something to see it, and you can always just switch a spam-bot off.
Windows 7 in your pocket
Thanks for the kind words.

It has a lot to do with Boo, really, particularly in the compiler. The rest of the OS is fairly similar to what you'd see in other .NET languages (although that has a lot to do with our reflectionless runtime not supporting a lot of the cool Boo functionality yet), but in the compiler the Boo list functionality has made life incredibly easy. The internals of the compiler really look a lot like that of a Lisp implementation; the code is loaded from .NET assembles into S-expression like lists, then transformed repeatedly until it becomes machine code.

No way this could've been done so cleanly in most other .NET languages; my previous .NET compilers can attest to that.
<I>Also, I have noticed that the people that do have Iphones use every opportunity to 'flash' them.</I>

or maybe they just take every opportunity to use them
Now they need to add keyword arguments.
"Also, I have noticed that the people that do have Iphones use every opportunity to 'flash' them."

or maybe they just take every opportunity to use them
Out of curiosity, were you ever able to find a solution for individual healthcare? You mentioned elsewhere that you were denied, and I'm hoping you meant that this was just an initial setback. This wasn't in California, was it?
But how would you represent your new composed component in the larger picture? Only solution I see is to give it a name that indicates the function. And pretty soon you are just moving boxes with names on around the canvas.
As snprbob86 pointed out, that already exists: Pyjamas @ pyjs.org.

I used pyjamas a while back for a couple toy projects. It's quite nice and sounds like what you're looking for.

With Skulpt, I wanted to avoid the build step that Pyjamas has (the compiler's written in Python, not Javascript so you run it ahead of time) and at least when I used it, it sometimes felt like Javascript with Python syntax, rather than actually programming in Python. It's certainly closer to Python than Skulpt is today though!
Perhaps what most interests me about the article is not the dichotomy of the two cultures, but in the area between them.

I'm a college sophomore studying EE in a notable university, but I spent most of my free time (and much of my homework time!) coding in high school. I had been using Linux from middle school, so my way of learning coding was picking up K&R's C book, learning the ropes, and starting to code on Linux. Linux really was an incredible atmosphere to learn to code in, and I learned more than just C. The ability to look at the source of other applications, to submit bugfixes for projects, and the incredible POSIX standard that makes C and other languages just ... whistle ... was great.

That said, I later abandoned Linux (several reasons: time, laptop incompatibility, much more time spent fiddling with radios, I "sold out", whatever) for day-to-day use. I still code and do it on Windows, but it's not the same. Now there are a lot of things of the "Windows culture" that I really like -- a shiny GUI for everyone, a huge smattering of applications which means that if I don't want to write it I don't have to, not having to deal with finding obscure driver patches so that my out-of-date hardware can stay supported, package management clashes, etc. But when I want to code, and I do so intermittently, I feel the intellectual gap.

I want that great POSIX interface, but more importantly I want an atmosphere that works around the code that I write. And here's where I feel the gap the most -- what about those of us who really enjoy a satisfying, intellectual coding experience, the "Unix culture" (and I don't code often enough to want to want to grind out consumer software), but still want the benefits felt for other users of the OS somewhat appreciably, and still want this end-user directed drag-and-drop "Windows culture".

I've heard that the Mac bridges the gap, but I'm an impoverished student, and spending $1000 on a Mac laptop is something in my semi-distant future.
I also have been very happy with gandi.
There seems to be a parallel with Arc here (though Arc's still running on top of Scheme): both languages are new versions of mature languages (Perl 5 and CL) which are/will be languishing in not-quite-final versions for the community to comment on. Is there a precedent for this as far as languages go? How did it end? What should the Perl people do after this April release to get to 6.0 and not stay in limbo?
Twitter, Facebook, LiveJournal DOS attacks 'targeted Georgian blogger'
I disagree; what takes extreme self discipline and organization is doing in 3,000 lines of code what a less organized developer would have done in 15,000. Code is a liability; developers who can get to the point save you in complexity and maintainability.
I intern'd at Apple and I would say that Apple's engineering talent is a level below Microsoft and Google. Apple combines good (but not incredible) engineering with the best product management (manager maybe...) on the planet. Microsoft and Google have much strong engineering teams but their much weaker on the PM side.
That is cool, but I am arguing that when you work primarily with named abstractions you are back to linguistic programming. And general purpose programming is about building abstractions on top of abstractions.

But I haven't used Simulink, so I may be wrong.
Twitter Outage Moves Into Day 2
Easy:

One of the teams midway down in the ratings will die in a tragic plane crash two months before the deadline. The children of the deceased, and one of the grievously wounded survivors, will band together to keep the entry alive, in their honor, but are unable (despite the efforts of the previously retired, curmudgeonly expert hired by their friends and neighbors, after holding a bake sale) to climb higher than 3rd place. Finally, the day before the deadline, a kitten-- a kitten, mind you-- meows frantically and leads a 7-year-old, tow-headed descendent to a closet where a shoebox is found, containing a scrap of paper, with a scribble mathematical formula, which when added, puts the team over the top. (Naturally, there's a thunderstorm at the time, so the power goes out 20 minutes before the deadline, but the team is able to use their ingenuity and good, American stick-to-it-iveness to rig a generator out of spare parts they find in the garage in order to upload the winning entry in the nick of time.)
"" That Schiller was willing to respond in such detail and length, on the record, is the first proof I’ve seen that Apple’s leadership is trying to make the course correction that many of us see as necessary for the long-term success of the platform. ""

No, they're not. If they were even trying, they would have scrapped the approval process altogether. True, the approval process has resulted in many high quality applications, but that doesn't change the fact that it's not completely retarded.

Also, funny to see John Gruber changing his stance on the issue in one day.
NameCheap all the way. Great usability. Be sure to grab a coupon here before purchasing: http://www.namecheapcoupon.com/
That was our thought with Twiddla (which will work on your iPhone, by the way).

Flash just adds too much pain for the amount of benefit it gives an app like this. You gain ease of development for some of the graphical stuff, but you lose the ability to overlay it over something else (like a document), the ability to pull in external plugins, and worst of all, you lose the right-click.

I wish these guys luck (they don't compete with us directly), but I sort of wonder why go with Flash when it's been proven that you don't need it for something like this?
Seems like they have:

name = SomeMethod("Suprotim", age: 20);
> Especially in this case: these guys are Hungarians and should really know better.

You seem to define "knowing better" as "agreeing with me". Since these people are Hungarians, I'd guess they know more about Hungarian culture than you do, particularly what symbols are considered offensive in that culture.

If most people wouldn't find the symbolism offensive, in practical terms it isn't a problem. (Of course, anything will be offensive to someone).
We don't :)
(Weebly)
Signs that you're a bad programmer:
1) You think you're an amazing programmer.
A precedural decomposition should at least partition your code along meaningful lines so that a reader can potentially find something faster or understand its functionality in simpler terms. If they have to jump all over the place to make any sense of your code, you're just obfuscating.

I've seen plenty of bad code where a task is broken down arbitrarily, creating sets of procedures like foo, begin_foo, execute_foo, actually_do_foo, foo_part_two, etc. This seems to be a particular problem with OOP, where tasks have to be handed off from object to object, down the chain of responsibility.
It seems that Twitter still havent got their scaling sorted.
I downvoted you. I don't wish to be mean, but what you said is just plain stupid.

> Otherwise, you're going to have to accept that some people want their information filtered by a third-party.

I totally agree with that. But I also believe that these people should not be allowed in a civilized society. Censorship is bad. End of question. There should be a zero-tolerance policy against any kind of censorship anywhere in the world.

And please, enough with the "what about the children?!" attitude. You are responsible for your children. The rest of the society doesn't have to suffer for them.
> look forward to a year's wait at the job before you can get covered.

No. It's wait a year before the company pays your premium. In every company I've ever been at you can pay it yourself from day one if you like.

It's a monetary bonus. It has nothing whatsoever to do with availability of insurance.

> you absolutely should be able to quit your job for whatever the hell reason you want without ending up uninsured.

Perhaps you (and from the mods, most of the readers) are not aware that you can. It's called COBRA. You have to pay the premiums yourself, but it doesn't cost any extra. While you were working it came out of your salary, now it comes out of your saving (or your new job).
Apps won't be the success or failure of Android/pre. Sexy well built phones will.
Motivation behind creating Wikipedia
Especially the answer to the question "Tell us about something deeply personal that helped you shape your world view, that has made Wikipedia what it is."
Domain Name Promo Codes for August | Domain Marvelous
"Lecture-and-exam classes don’t work. We’ve been doing them for hundreds of years now, so there is no more doubt about that."

That's funny, they seem to have been working fine for hundreds of years. I know they worked fine for me, even if they were a bit boring at times.

Seriously, though, at the end of the day, no single system will work for everyone. Many colleges have tried different educational models. Many of them failed, and those that survived mostly went back to the traditional model for a reason: it works.
Hi. I'm not familiar with Renraku OS and just read the "Renraku: Future OS" post. It seems to me to be a mix of Singularity, Unununium and the TUNES project.

I have thought about a similar system before: install-time verified (and native compiled) managed code, which is guaranteed to only run within its environment, so no need to separate processes into their own address spaces, object store instead of filesystem, orthogonal persistence, network transparent communications channels (in fact, IMO everything should go over some sort of communications channel which can be "rewired" or redirected. Like piping in unix command line, only global, for all apps, GUI or CLI).

Anyway, interesting project!
I don't understand the following point you made:

"so if it's opaque to you...,you probably shouldn't be programming"

So your saying that someone should not program if they
haven't learned basic lisp ( 5 )?

Or are you suggesting that there should be some time limit... like if you program for X months but don't understand it you are forced to quit.

But.. further... What is the purpose of forcing these
people to quit?

And.. What is the purpose of belittling these people?
Agreed. I might even flip my widescreen monitor on its side. Maybe not at home, since movies don't work so well like that, but certainly in work where I don't watch movies.
Touching story and three cheers for Wales, the Open Source Movement and Wikipedia.
s/GoDaddy/TuCows/
gandi.net. they're not the cheapest, but they're extremely reliable, your data are protected by strict local privacy laws (company is french), and it just "works". never had a single problem in the some years i've been using them.
I can't even type = or +
Maybe it's just me (Firefox 3.5.2 on WinXP), but the plus key ('+' and '=') doesn't seem to work, so I can't type 1+2 or x=1. Just tried it in Chrome, and that works fine. IE8 does too (though it's very slow).

Anyway, very neat project! How layered is it -- do you think it could approach the speed of JavaScript?
1. They removed PPC, but added x86-64 (which has larger code size).

2. Binary is not the largest part of an application bundle (e.g. Mail binary [ppc, i386] is 5.7 MB, Mail.app bundle is 286 MB).
I have to say, I really didn't like the document much.
Not because of substance. Some of what he says is true.

On style, though, I think the document is trash. Some of what I say is probably even a bit ad hominem.

Most of the good programmers I know don't spend time worrying about bad programmers. They just write good code and cleanup bad code when they see it.

If someone feels compelled to write up an essay about bad programmers, he probably spends a lot of time dealing with bad programmers.

That experience should lead to humility, not arrogance. If you deal with a lot of bad programmers, you might not be as good as you think you are. After all, you work at the same place on the same project as a bunch of bad programmers. They where hired under the same standards as you.

To me, the document just seemed like arrogant posturing. An attempt at crafting a "negative identity" (define a group by vilifying the outsider). The best way to "be", and to be recognized as, a good programmer is to write good code. All the other stuff is just horse shit.
>>I'm pretty sure that most people could learn how to program with some competence.

That is what logic tells you, but I've seen smarter people than me, which couldn't get it even after years of trying. (I helped a few with labs while studying.)

You shouldn't have too much grit.

You characterization about handling program size fits well with my own development. Interesting point.
I'm not talking about learning programming. The reference in the article was to people that already were programmers.

To put it another way: if you call yourself a programmer, and sell your skills as a programmer, but can't mentally decompose "(+ 2 3)" into an AST (basically the first, and easiest, step to understanding), even after Lisp's general syntax is explained to you, then you aren't actually a programmer.
Schmidt has on the order of 10M Google shares or options. Making the stock price go up by $0.01 is worth $100k to him. Spending an hour thinking about salary instead of Google's future is a bad use of his time.

If your company has a P/E ratio of N and you have more than 1/Nth of the stock, giving money to the company actually makes you more money. There are subtle ways to do this. For example it probably makes more sense for the founders to buy their own plane for company trips than have Google pay for it, where it reduces reported profit and share price.
It might feel like those accounts and tax returns are done not for yourself, but for some paper-pushing bureaucrat. Bitterness and indignation could easily bubble back to the top - running a business is not a way to run away from arbitary demands from others, only your particular boss at the time.

Getting away from a bad work situation could be done by working somewhere else, not necessarily in a bran new business.
Yea, it's a mix of several other projects. I've been accumulating ideas from all kinds of sources for years, and I've ended up with the list you see in the Future OS post (among others). One thing I'd like to note is that the interaction between objects, even just plain method calls, can really be seen as a communication channel and made network transparent very easily. I'd really like to get basic networking and network transparency into Renraku by year's end, but we'll see.
I used to think the same; couldn't really grasp LISP and had even more serious problems with pure functional languages such as Haskell. But the thing is, you can make up all sorts of excuses for not knowing something, but in the end, it's really just not knowing, no matter how good your excuses are.

Then I've spent some time learning LISP, practising it, trying to implement more and more complex algorithms in it and while I'm still not a pro, I'm starting to grasp the basics. And it made me a better programmer, even though at my daytime job I work as a C#/.NET programmer, the little LISP knowledge I have heavily influenced the quality of my code and I think for the better.
You mean NeXT, which was Unix?
How to avoid (if you're a C programmer) writing utterly terrible code - always include these WARNINGS in your build step:

WARNINGS := -Wall -W -Wunused-parameter -Wmissing-declarations

WARNINGS += -Wstrict-prototypes -Wmissing-prototypes -Wsign-compare

WARNINGS += -Wconversion -Wshadow -Wcast-align -Wparentheses

WARNINGS += -Wsequence-point -Wdeclaration-after-statement -Wundef

WARNINGS += -Wpointer-arith -Wnested-externs -Wredundant-decls

WARNINGS += -Werror -Wdisabled-optimization -pedantic

CFLAGS += $(WARNINGS)

Note: -pedantic is pretty good if you really wanna learn how to write code that will work properly.

Also: Treating Warnings as Errors is a good thing. You'll learn a lot, and the most important thing will be: handle all warnings. Do not release code until it builds clean.
On Windows that looks fine, but I wonder how that will look on say Linux or Mac OS X. Even MS didn't copy their ribbon style over to Office 2008 (they used something similar though). I hope OOo will do the same.
Alternative Treatment For Prostate Cancer
moniker.com is my favorite.
Can you enlighten us on how you can keep your employer provided health benefits after you leave the company. He could have taken the COBRA, but that is seriously expensive and has an expiration date (3,6,12 months, not really sure). When you leave a company that bundles health you don't choose anything.
We are totally of the same of the same opinion:
http://gehrcke.de/2009/08/whats-faster-a-supercomputer-or-ec...

Additionally, one has to say that the quantities in the graph Ian is showing have a much bigger uncertainty than pretended.

Jan-Philip Gehrcke
Nevermind this.. Posted under the wrong thread.
The paradigm of the internet is that it is user generated content.
Wikipedia succeeds because it is a concise metaphor of the internet.
DHH: The problem with averages
Above, you said whether they could guess it, not whether they could understand it after explained.

"you can't take a guess at what "(+ 2 3)" means"

I can see your meaning if it was explained to someone and they still didn't grok it. But I would still kinda feel like encouraging them.
"Are there deeply personal experiences that sometimes, lead to the creation of great institutions?"

This question is very interesting. Would be great to hear answers from start-up founders here.
Ryanair is one opinionated company
Maybe he knew something that others do not?
Anybody else on Mac OS X unable to type a colon in the interactive prompt?

I tried it in both Firefox 3.5 and Safari 4, and neither works.

Apparently it's not just this site, though. According to http://www.cambiaresearch.com/c4/702b8cd1-e5b0-42e6-83ac-25f... it's only sending a shift (KeyCode 16) when I try typing a colon...

On my Ubuntu system, the colon works just fine. Is this a known bug?
From my reading On2 were one of the few people who avoided rather than licenced some very basic concepts from MPEG and they marketed this as one of their unique selling points.

This may partly explain lack of world beating performance compared with what is theoretically possible if you ignore patents, and also means that Google may have been paying for the opposite of patents, patent workarounds (whether On2 patented these in turn I don't know).
I'm glad to hear no one has recommended Godaddy. They are not good. They raised their prices and they try to upsell you and autorenew you for services constantly.

I have used Namecheap for the last 7 or 8 years and have been very happy. But they have also raised their prices. Nearlyfreespeech.net is just about the cheapest registrar out there, at $8.59 year and they advocate for the privacy and security of their customers as much as humanly possible. https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/services/domains
How do I learn Ruby & Rails?
I often get asked this question as well - I'll be sure to remember this page as a resource to send folks to.
And students asking "why" is a taboo in current educational model.
Many, actually
There are several things I believe to be true regarding health insurance:

1) It's not insurance, since the thing you're paying for is guaranteed to happen. It's a pre-paid service plan

2) Congress made a mistake during WWII by tying health insurance to jobs. This has proven impossible to rectify, leaving serious doubt in my mind of Congress' ability to iterate or improvise as conditions change. So whatever you get, you get. Don't expect a little fix here and a little fix there.

3) Insurance policies themselves are so complex people don't know what they are buying. Some easy standardization needed here

4) Simple optimizations performed by millions of independent algorithms that optimize and learn from each other over time create solutions many orders of magnitude greater than one complex big design up front solution

5) It's broken. But simply because something is broken does not mean that any fix is better than the current status quo. If my house started burning, I would not try to put the fire out with gasoline simply in an effort to do something.