skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So, then here is a question: If .NET is so big, the spec is unmanageable and so on, why even attempt this ?

There was a time when DEC shops were turning out projects between two and five times the speed of a comparable IBM shop. The advantage was that the defaults were sane and you could actually know the system. It was stable and a breeze to develop for.

By bringing 'mono' or something like it into the open source community we are attempting to match microsoft at its own game, which is imho completely stupid.

If open source is to succeed it should not attempt to copy the kind of architecture that you can only build and maintain with an army of programmers that will slog away at it simply because they get paid to do so.
Backache Causes Remedies For Back
The blogger doth protest too much, methinks. We learn all about his academic credentials almost as soon as the blog post begins, but don't hear anything about his real-world accomplishments beyond attending great schools.

What does everyone think of the blogger's academics page?

http://www.stanford.edu/~pgbovine/academic.htm

Disclaimer: I don't know the blogger, and as far as I know I don't know any of his professional colleagues or classmates from any era. I'm not competent to judge accomplishments in the domain of computer science, but I try to pick up nuances from English writing, just as does any other reader of English.
Getting hit with low balance fees and caring about $13 a month both suggest to me that this is a color-of-the-bike-shed decision until you get bigger.
"So the question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be."

Everytime I hear or read this line I get chills down my back. He took a word with an incredibly negative connotation (still remains true today) and turned it into a call for action. This is how I imagine true leaders-- people who listen to their criticisms, but use their intellect and common sense to turn their perceived weaknesses into strengths.
> You don't write code for novices....

That's not what I wrote.

> You don't think language design has an impact on overall maintainability of the code....

Also not what I wrote.

> maintainability is all about....

Still not what I wrote.

> You would insist that any code you wrote should be maintained by a professional programmer.

That's a lot closer to what I wrote, but it's subtly wrong.

> Readability of an algorithm has nothing to do with maintainability....

That's nowhere near what I wrote.

> if you name everything right the reader is a fool if he doesn't get it.

I've never written anything, anywhere, suggesting that idea.

Please do give me some credit for having coherent thoughts based on practical experience writing widely used programs. The nuance in my parent posts wasn't particularly subtle.
I use Wells Fargo, Business Account. When I started the account I asked them to waive the account minimum fee and that's the only way they were going to get my business and they waived it. There have been times when I had a low account balance and they didn't charge me anything. When you are opening the account it pays to understands these charges and negotiate with them they usually listen.
"The result has been a torrent of research testing the links between metaphors and their physical roots, with many of the papers reading as if they were commissioned by Amelia Bedelia, the implacably literal-minded children’s book hero."

That's a great simile in the article. Linguists who study translation (for example Peter Newmark) have been studying metaphor for a long time. What's interesting about metaphor is how automatically writers and speakers use metaphor in communication, and how much a reader or listener with a different linguistic background may not recognize a metaphor.
google "free small business checking"

Hopefully, there is a bank in your area among those results. If not, $156 a year is a trivial expense: just forget it and focus on building your businesses.
I'm in a similar situation and I just wanted to share the little hangup I ran into:

I have a Delaware LLC and I live in California. When I tried applying for a Wells Fargo account in California they said I need a Foreign Qualification, which also means I would have to pay the California minimum franchise tax of $800/year.

I'm sure there's an easy way around this but I just set it aside because it's not a priority for me.
I use a local/regional bank. They charge no monthly fees even if you have a $0 balance. Most banks have fees on checking accounts for corporations. The bank is Amegy Bank (only serves Texas).
That is unfortunately true.

There is this old joke:

Q: How do you know someone is from MIT {Stanford, Havard, ...}?

A: He tells you.
For anyone else who wasn't previously familiar with the acronym, GCD stands for Grand Central Dispatch: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Central_Dispatch
Knowing what to work on is certainly more important than trying to brute force all problems with man hours, but unless you've spent hours and hours of hard work learning your field, you won't KNOW what to work on.

The only reason the Caterina people knew what to work on this time is because of the hundreds of hours of experience they got building flickr.

The importance of hard work to success is extremely well documented: http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2009/08/02/...

http://blogmaverick.com/2009/05/13/success-motivation/

http://money.cnn.com/2008/10/21/magazines/fortune/talent_col...

http://www.amazon.com/Outliers-Story-Success-Malcolm-Gladwel...
I see these types of posts (Google front page, FireFox start page, etc.) all the time...I don't see the point either.
Thanks for the link! The web page design is horrible, but I'll read through it and see what they offer and how it compares to my ideas.
I can't even follow along an audio book while doing nothing. I keep zoning out.
This is pretty impressive:

2009 ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award for HAMPI: A Solver for String Constraints, an ISSTA 2009 paper with Kiezun (lead author), Ganesh, Hooimeijer, and Ernst

The rest is mediocre-impressive. Nothing to laugh at, but nothing to distinguish him from the other MIT/Stanford students either. I think he has a good point.
Usually optical cables have two fibers (for Tx and Rx); you can use one fiber but it's more expensive because of the splitters on each end.
Preemptively pausing the book when my work requires full attention works for me. I also use the 30 second replay feature on the iPhone. Maybe the most important thing is to pick the right book type. I find historical non-fiction is great for me because I often already know a bit about the subject so I can listen and just grab some random facts or stories without being concerned about every detail. I rarely multi-task with complex fiction. I feel like I'm missing too much.
I can listen to music -- but it has to have a low novelty factor. Old favorites I've heard many, many times before or some highly-repetitive electronic music can be comforting without being distracting.
If we want to send people far away in the long term, there are certaint problems involving people in space that are not solved sending unmanned spacecrafts. We need to actually send people. Ships with antiradiation shells, autonomous and sustainable life-support, etc.
To be precise, anything relying on "educate the user so that they know better" is doomed to be insecure. It is likely to be successful in the sense of becoming popular because it offers humans someone else to blame.

For example, if I am in IT and I tell people to choose a 512 character password with alphanumeric characters that changes every day and doesn't repeat any sequence that appeared in a previous password or contain a dictionary word, I can expect people to write their passwords down on paper and get hacked, even if I tell them not to write it down.

But I can always blame them for writing them down, few people will blame me for being too lazy to find another way to secure the system.
Rethinking Addiction
For others: scroll to the lower part of the page.
Given that our brains are hard-wired to find patterns, I'll bet this also makes us more likely to "find" them where none exist.

See: http://scienceblogs.com/cortex/2008/11/its_one_of_the_more.p...
Music And Dance | Music Project | Music Express
Not exactly a guide on "how to respond to criticism." More like "Tim Ferris Presents... MLK's Letter From A Birmingham City Jail."

He basically RT'd Martin Luther King Jr.
PyPy Status Blog: First results of the JIT
Google's first press release
[On Glenn Reynolds, you'll find that he has been less than supportive of Republicans pointing out that the 'tea parties' are less about being pro-Republican as they are about being more a reaction to greater government interventions - which were started under the previous Republican administration]

Bullshit. The tea parties are about misplaced righteous anger. Most of the people there have no idea what "government intervention" means and are simply reactionaries to Fox News/right smear propaganda. It's clear that most of them don't even know what they're protesting about, they just want to call the President a socialist.
Another tactic to try is asking other small/medium sized businesses who their bank is. Often if they make an introduction they'll get a referral fee, and the bank might work harder to please you if your friend is a valued client.
For the past 10 years it's just about having the money to pay for your exams. Education has gone downhill since the collapse of the SU. Russia doesn't need mathematicians or physicists anymore. My uncle is a professor and gets paid well under $1K a month. All that matters is what the price of oil is, and how much they can export while the old refineries still haven't fallen apart. Russia's income is purely from oil & gas now.
I'm sure HN is not too proud to steal one of /.'s features. :)
Become A Better Developer By Indexing Your Brain
IANAA: I think you owe that $800 to California if you're operating any business inside California, regardless of whether it's registered in California or not.
Is it a sort of oxymoron exercise or something?
In The Psychology of Persuasion the author looks at how the appearance of authority yields big results: http://www.takebackyourbrain.com/2007/the-psychology-of-pers... - The disconnect, then, is that confidence and arrogance are often interpreted as authority.
>"The smartest kids in the class had reputable externally-recognizable marks of status --- their top-ranked grades on exams and homeworks --- and thus did not need to assert their intelligence."

Having the top grades on exams and homework doesn't in any way demonstrate that those kids are the smartest in the class. Grades are correlated with intelligence to some degree, but much more strongly correlated with work-ethic and compliance.
In most cases, users will either:

1. Choose a memorable (read: simple, dictionary, insecure) password

2. Choose a good password and write it down

If Joe the Cubedweller writes his login password down on a sticky note, the only other people who are expected to have physical access to that note are him and the other cubedwellers, and they're going to have little to gain from seeing it. I would be much more concerned with Joe picking a bad password that could be guessed by an attacker on the outside.
Distributed computing in Lisp. Again
back in the days when you mentioned being on the board of webvan with pride
one neat way to define a class is like so:

function MyClass(a, b) {
// use this function as an instance constructor
// eg, var m = new MyClass('foo', 'bar');
this.a = a;
this.b = b;
}
MyClass.prototype = {};
_extend(MyClass.prototype, {
instanceMethod: function() {
...
},
...
});
I live in PA. I have a DE registered LLC.

You don't mention the number of transactions you do per month or your typical account balance. These will determine which business checking product you need.

I went with PNC Bank's Free Business Checking. http://tr.im/pncbizcheck

- No monthly fee
- No minimum balance
- Max free transactions: 200/month
- Max free cash deposit: $5,000/month

Here is why I chose PNC:

1: PNC Business Checking has RemoteDeposit: A scanner that you can use to scan checks at home and deposit online yourself. (Optional: extra service fee of $50/month)

2: The application over the phone was painless, took 5 minutes, then 15 minutes at my local PNC branch. Walked out with working bank account and starter checks.

3: Good Merchant services for when you want to accept credit cards online

4: 800+ locations/branches (Eastern USA mainly)

So far (two months in) PNC gets 5/5 from me.

EDIT: added optional
Unfortunately where I went to middle/high school there was very little elitism built around GPA and test scores. However, everyone just instinctively knew that the most dangerous bullies were not the most popular kids, but instead the kids just below them in the social heirarchy. The top tier were generally secure in themselves, but those below were always looking for an edge to get into the pantheon.
Integrating Warbler and Buildr into Scala, JRuby, Java and Rails bliss
if you dont use prototype the function will not belong το the new object you create, therefore you will not be able το call the function from settimeout, which was the problem the author assumed το have.
If I'm running a website and I just happen to live in California, does that count as operating a business in California?
Wells Fargo is the best for merchant services (next day deposit) and also have a great service stack for things like payroll. I had a company that used them for both and they were great. We also had a savings account with a regional bank (WCB). The small guys work harder for your business and will pay a better % (even in liquid accounts) and you may need the relationship someday for a line of credit.
Interesting, Sequoia & KPCB started in 1972.
I usually give a different email address to each service that I sign up to, so I can tell if they are selling my address, but I never thought of giving a different mother's maiden name so I can detect phishing. It's a reasonable strategy, but I have trouble remembering the name of my elementary school, my favorite color (I dont care), the make of my first car (my parent's or the one I actually paid for) ... However, I will trythe strategy of giving a couple of wrong answers to weed out the fakes.
I haven't noticed anything to suggest that elitism is more prevalent among those without elite credentials. Two distinguished professors from my school come to mind. Both of them have very impressive track records and yet both of them are on opposite ends of the arrogance spectrum.

I think it comes down to how comfortable you are with yourself. If you constantly wish you were higher up in the food chain, there's a good chance you are an elitist, and getting elite credentials likely won't satisfy you anyway.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not defending NASA. I'm defending the long-term value of space flight, and rejecting the idea that we have to get our affairs perfectly in order down here before we can head up into space. First of all, our affairs will never be perfectly in order, there will always be something else to fix - do you truly expect utopia to be achieved before we can allow ourselves to spend ANY resources on space? Second of all, if we suddenly stop all spending on space, all that money will not magically get redirected to humanitarian purposes (ok, a bit of a strawman, you never claim it would). Third, even if ALL the resources were redirected to good use, it would likely be for short-term fixes rather than any systemic gains.

I firmly believe that we can and SHOULD do both. NASA isn't the right model - something like the X PRIZE is much more exciting. The same is true of saving the world - pouring billions into humanitarian aid might work for specific short-term goals, but we need different models for long-term change - the obvious being more stable political and economic conditions to allow a self-sustaining standard of living.

It's a false dichotomy because, depending on who you ask, you can ALWAYS find a thing Y that is worth doing more than X. Given enough patience and small enough steps, I'm sure it's possible to build a chain of things that are increasingly higher priority to achieve, that nonetheless ends up being perfectly circular, like Escher's staircase.
Ask HN: The ideal company for programmers, or giving freedom to your programmers
I find myself often torn between two desires:

a) Having the freedom to work on something I'm passionate about. And being able to work on it by my schedule (this doesn't mean I'll be working 4 hrs a day, but it does mean that I can choose to work 4 hrs on a day of low creativity). I usually conclude that I'll need to start my own company if I want to achieve this.

b) Building a great product. Working on something like a Google Android, which usually requires a team.

I think the crux of the conflict is this: If given the freedom to work according to my creative instinct and my schedule, my output in one week would far exceed the 40 hr output that my company gets out of me right now. My company (and many others that I've seen), unfortunately, do not realize this, or can not risk having a "maverick" on the team. In the end, its a loss for the company, and frustrating for me.

Programming jobs require creativity. By letting your programmer go for a long ride, grab their favorite drink, go to their favorite hangout etc, they probably will have a much more elegant and solution to a given problem than having to stay chained to their desk for 8 hrs a day and hammering out a solution.

A related issue: I'm not sure why I dont see more work from home IT companies. Why are we still stuck in the industrial age, where working during the day hours, being at a certain location, and hammering away for 8 hrs was equivalent to producing a certain amount of output? We have tools that make working from home easy for employees, and gives them freedom to do other things with their lives.

Some background (kinda boring):

I'm in my mid 20s, have a grad degree from a great school, and have been coding half my life. I work a 9-5 job where I get to work on technologies that I enjoy, but I'm not passionate about the product. I dislike being chained to my desk. I don't see the reason why I should not be able to work in more relaxed settings, and by my schedule (specially since we communicate 90% by email anyway).

I don't see myself taking the YC plunge because I am married and have a kid, so taking a risk is kinda hard at this point. I am working on a product of my own, but between work and other stuff, I don't get to put as much time on it as I want.

Any suggestions? I'm leaning towards saving up and then taking 3-4 months off my job to work on my own product.

- Edit to clean up formatting.
Workers World
He absolutely did not dissect my arguments. His responses were canned responses or rather irrelevant.

1. Haskell does not have good hash tables

His response: Just use HSJudy. He forgets to mention that it isn't even a hash table and its even LGPL. An amusing fact is that the default hash table implementations are so slow that someone had to implement their own from scratch on the GPLS benchmark

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32q/benchmark.php?test=kn...

2. Haskell's lazy evaluation has bad consequences for SMP programming.

His response: First he tries to argue against it. Then when I convince him that I am not just making things up, he finally backtracks and says that's why he made a library to cover up the shortcomings.

3. Haskell's default static bundling of LGPL GMP.

I didn't specify the word "distribution", but I was talking in part about commercial usage where this is a reasonable assumption. He decided to harp on this single specific word and declared the whole point to be invalid.
Makes you wonder how many popular websites are using code snippets copied and pasted verbatim from the web.
Wow, a valuation of several billion? What a joke. They have no revenue stream, they're just giving away search for free. I don't see how this startup could ever be successful.
I think it is true that the most insecure tend to exhibit the most elitism; elitism being defined as going out of your way to put down another group you consider inferior. The author, however, goes out of his way to condemn this sort of elitism, basically succumbing to the same elitism he is condemning. Just as I'm basically doing, going out of my way to write this comment. I think the thing to realize is that comparing yourself to others in a better/worse than relationship is a pretty human thing to do, even if it isn't good. It should be avoided and maybe even corrected, but it shouldn't be condemned or used as a way to put people down, lest you succumb to it yourself.
"Javascipt The Good Parts" is to the Rhino book what "The Little Lisper" is to the hyperspec.
I slipped in before the change to Chase and got a free Wamu business checking account. I use this account

https://www.wamu.com/business/checking_account/free_checking...

No monthly fee or minimum balance, up to 250 checks per month.

Large bank and getting larger with Chase acquiring, I didn't see a similar Chase plan so I think I should be grandfathered in as they move to Chase.

This is the closest I found to a "personal account for business"

Works great for me, sounds very similar to the PNC deal also mentioned.
I would be much more concerned with Joe picking a bad password that could be guessed by an attacker on the outside.

This argument presents a false dichotomy, as the issue is not how strong to make passwords, but whether there are other security mechanisms that could be used in conjunction with passwords or instead of passwords.

My point is that a password places all the blame on Joe instead of on IT, so IT prefers passwords :-)
Interesting article but I am not convinced outward expressions of elitism have much of a correlation with one's academic background. In my experience, the most talented and creative individuals are modest, hard working and often quiet while those lacking demonstrable talent are the ones who make the most noise. I'd wager talent has little to no correlation with academic background.
He should have added his library to Cliki:

http://www.cliki.net/Distributed
"He basically RT'd Martin Luther King Jr."

Is "RT'd" the new blogspam? :)
Which reminds me of one of my relatives who said that he worked long hours but not very many of them.
The whole thing was sketchy. They told me there wouldnt be fees, so when fees showed up, I complained and they said they would remove them. When the fees didnt go away, I asked to be refunded. They said they could only refund the last 3 months of fees since they had "no record" past that, even though I had the account for a year.

Anyway, I just didn't want to deal with them anymore so I closed the account.
"Google, a start-up dedicated to providing the best search experience on the web"

Google is one of these less common start-ups who started doing one thing and ended up successful (to this day) with that specific idea. Yes, they extended their reach a lot, but the core is still the same as on the first day.
I completely agree. Yet I read the entire text, which I have never read before, and it is such a great call to action for any just cause.

Man, it makes me think about how little I am doing to advance what I believe in out of comfort.
This is mostly a hobby business that I want to run lean without much plan for growth. I'm looking for more efficient business accounts that better match my uses.
and eToys, @Home, WebMD...