skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What I took from Spolsky article wasnt that you shouldn't touch X/Y/Z, but that you should approach new code in the simplest and quickest way you can.

I have often been guilty over engineering things to do them the "right way", to either end up throwing the feature out anyway or having to reengineer because I didnt know enough about the problem to fulfill its design from the outset anyway.

while prototype fast is a reasonably mundane point, Its still one we get wrong time and time again, and I think programmers pay lip service to it as an ideal, but when it comes to actually having to leave that nasty bit of code alone because it does its job, too often we go down the wrong path of making it "right"
I have a friend who develops OpenGL drivers in C for various aerospace uses and his perspective on code quality was very interesting to hear.

As a web-developer I used to think of tests as frivolous wastes of time, whereas he saw them as an essential and necessary part of the development process.

Since I started implementing testing on all my projects I have noticed that my ability to change the code has actually gone up, which in in stark contrast with my initial expectations. I think that having a sounds testing methodology definitely has benefits even in cases where financial/life loss due to software failure is an impossibility...
Once a winner is chosen, the utilities will help promote and possibly subsidize the cost of the lamp.

What is the incentive for utility companies to subsidize products that use less of their product?
That's a feature, not a bug. Keynes's whole point is that recessions are caused when too many people want to save and too few people want to consume. Putting more money into circulation puts weight on the other side of that scale.
Fair enough, but I'd point out that I've had a jailbroken phone for quite a while, installed and played with thousands of apps, and never experienced one "crash". What's the difference? Simple, I only installed tried and tested apps, even from Cydia.

Jailbreaking the phone is simply not inherently more unstable. It's like anything else, if you install unstable stuff, you get unstable results. SBSettings is perfectly stable and works well, as do most of the simpler addons for it, RotationInhibitor being one of these. But quality of JB apps varies, and there certainly are a lot of unstable ones out there.

So before you go blaming jailbreaking itself, I'd investigate to see what specific apps are interfering with your app, and see what the issue is. Because a jailbroken phone is certainly not inherently more unstable. It's the unstable addons are the problem, but people are stupid and will install any old thing, no matter how crap quality it might be.
You echo my thoughts on the issue. But what really bothers me is the logical outgrowth of that logic.

What I mean is, as you said, most agree the planet is getting warmer. That's the actual problem here. But Global Warming advocates are so convinced of their absolute infallibility that they're suggesting a solution based on a cause they can't prove.

So my question is "What if they're wrong?" If the Global Warming movement really believes this trend will lead to the end of life as we know it shouldn't they be considering all options? Shouldn't someone be talking about ways to live if their climate predictions are correct and we aren't the cause?

The fact that they completely ignore that side of the issue tells me their pushing an agenda not trying to solve the actual problem.
Lily Allen incites mails
Seven cringe-worthy tech movie moments
How to Add a File to MSI with ORCA without Cabbing
Do you believe that a prospective employer who through a Google search on your name finds this rambling letter (no matter how accurate or anonymous) will be more or less likely to hire you?

I believe less. It's not like some others that I've read that are absolute bars, but IMO, this one doesn't help out your job search.
Yeah, it sounds kinda nice to me. But that' because I'm stuck with PHP for the time being. I'm tired of fighting the language though, so creating these kinds of hacks just becomes more of an intellectual exercise.

And I think you're right that YC's commenters are by and large not PHP developers. I've only known a couple of real hackers that work in PHP, and even they didn't work in it by choice. Though it makes me a little sad to say this because PHP was the first language I learned (hooray sentiment!), I hope PHP dies off soon. It has matured in recent years, but unfortunately not in any new directions. I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that the vast majority of PHP programmers are idiots who couldn't code their way out of a paper bag, and the better PHP hackers tend to be enterprise-y, as that's the direction PHP is headed nowadays.
Quoting the comments section:

The best possible way to achieve cacheability of an object is to perform
a server-side re-write of all linked content (images, scripts etc) and
re-write the links to refer to a file name based off the MD5 hash of the
file content.

So, your link:
http://us.i1.yimg.com/us.yimg.com/i/ww/beta/y3.gif
is re-written:
http://us.i1.yimg.com/never-expire/A31D5F12.gif
Where A31D5F12 is the MD5 hash.

Does somebody use this convention? It seems logical but I haven't seen it wildly used.
Curing Your Restlessness: Limiting Your Choices
Africa’s SMS crisis - and how to stop it
See, this is a straw man argument. No one, and I mean no responsible person in government has argued for no action at all in my lifetime. We've had environmental regulations since people were afraid of Global Cooling. This has always been a question of degree not one of "action vs. non-action"
I think pretty much all the OS vendors have equally bad track records with kernel/userland interface design. But, having done a few device driver audits, I respectfully disagree, and submit to you that if your job exposed you to 3rd party driver code, you too would rather MSFT took a risk on kernel APIs than increase the number of drivers.
Where I live, the word convicted relates to a crime. Wikipedia seems to agree with me: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conviction.

By that definition, Microsoft was never convicted, since it was never accused of a crime. Microsoft was tried in civil court.
Perhaps browsers could have a white list that the user could modify and have a select view sites avoid losing the cache even when clearing the cache from a menu option...

I think it might constitute :)
The Eight Stages of Programming a New Feature
We all heard about the five stages of grief as defined by the Kübler-Ross model. Now, My 25 Percent presents the new, revised model describing the eight stages that a software developer goes through when asked to develop a new feature.
Employees want a day off, not a Friday Fun Day
Seedcamp Founder Saul Klein Talks European Entrepreneurship
Well, I suppose they aren't burning more coal than they were already, and that carbon shouldn't be counted twice (once for the power and once for the brick).
Sometimes the only thing you can say is just that you have nothing to say, but wish that you did.
All-on-one-page version: http://www.itworld.com/print/78886
Java Puzzlers are asked in interviews
This blog is about one of the question that i was asked in an interview two years back. I forgot this question but yesterday i again faced this question and this is a “java puzzler”.
To take this to an even more absurd level, a true genius duct tape programmer is one who knows that the rest of his team aren't geniuses and programs as such. :-)
Does this mess up what the new 'semantic web markup' movement is pushing? ... (I.e. google's image search uses the image name as a signal to what the image might be, albeit a small signal)
> it sometimes use different terms as the EU is not quite a state yet but I'd argue "convicted" captures the meaning there too.

It only captures it if the EU considers it to be a crime. Does it? (genuinely curious)
IPhone Gaming Pioneer Tapulous Prepares Its Next Big Hit
Maybe my reaction was too brief for some, allow me re-phrase:

Web design is a fast-moving field and the topic of credibility and communication of web sites remains key. In this context, I question the 8 year old research as being the best valuable we can get. A lot of work is done in this area and our collective attention is better directed to state of the art.

It would be great to have a more up-to-date version of this research. Unfortunately it isn't on http://www.webcredibility.org/ -- the site referred in the paper.

http://www.useit.com/ is a good resource and they are others.
According to the blog post the pages made were all "samples", presumably to demonstrate the service. Fairly shifty, but now that they're taken down and the only way to get one is by request, there doesn't seem to be much to complain about.
We noticed this after finding an error in our apache config such that some of our assets were set to be cached longer than we really wanted (30 days), much to our chagrin. It turned out that even though you tell the browser to keep something for a very long time, it most likely won't stay there.

Our general assumption was that it is due to the default cache size of browsers being tiny in comparison to the amount of data that users now consume, coupled with every webpage you visit putting stuff into the cache (rightly so).

I believe the default cache of firefox is still set at 50mb which seems very small.
Microsoft makes Web development tools available for free
Microsoft has been on a “Spark” roll lately, rolling out discount programs for students (DreamSpark) and startups (BizSpark).
“All good things must come to an end, but great things will live on forever, only in a different form.” I am not sure what your belief system is, but I am going to express mine because I am assuming, based on your post, that Greg is an example of a ‘great thing.’ And although he will not be by your side in physical form for those late nights, his legacy will live on forever. It is important to realize that Greg would not want you to mourn and instead he wants you to live, to live in a way that you have never lived before. Death is obviously an inevitable occurrence in our lives, but it does not necessarily need to result in feelings of angst because Greg served his purpose in the world by becoming part of who you are today. He will forever be with you, like all great things, only this time in a different form. Have the will to live, have the will to thrive, and have the will to allow Greg’s legacy to continue onward as your start-up becomes a huge success…

Good luck to you and may Greg rest in peace…
Using YQL To Manage Your Yahoo meme Account
That's the situation I find myself in: a developer stuck with PHP.

In response to the first bit, a friend observed that Warnock applies.
By "level off" I meant "return to a growth rate comparable to before the boom", though in actually it sometimes ends up negative -- Japan and much of Europe is breeding below replacement rates (read: committing cultural suicide). But more importantly, I never said that this has played out everywhere in the world; in fact I've strongly implied the opposite.
My problem with the phrase is unless I'm missing something, Microsoft was not found guilty of a crime (as sid_0 pointed out, U.S. vs Microsoft was a civil matter) and therefore the word "convicted" is meaningless. Actually, it could be considered slanderous.

This so far has been a community that prides itself on accuracy. If you're going to accuse someone of criminal acts, they should at least have been tried and found guilty in criminal court.
This is the only feature at the moment that i need which dropbox is lacking. Makes it difficult to use Dropbox in more than one environment such as work versus school when everything is synced everywhere.
The demise of the American Empire has been predicted for decades. While this guy makes some good points about how the economy isn't fixed, they get lost in his sensationalist rhetoric.
There was a good NPR piece about this yesterday, which went into some detail about the disrepute the "detectorists" (hobbyists with metal detectors) are in, and how unfair that is given the close collaboration they've developed with museums over the last N years.
This is a very very hard problem. The fact is that in a startup you own 50% because you are there working. Once one founder is no longer present it's very hard to claim the 50% is still valid.
Sure, you can aggregate that information and offer a dashboard. But this is nothing a large company can't do for itself, and there's no especial value for them in having a standardized dashboard. It's more useful for consumers who might with to go a standard page to look up aggregated info about any given brand before making buying decisions, but they tend to be domain specific - rate-coffeebrands.com rate-cookie-brands.com or suchlike.

It's the old stress on the web - providers and publishers want to be unique and stand out from everyone, consumers would often rather have standardized pages so they can get information quickly and consistently without navigating 100 different kinds of web flair and registering at every site they might be temporarily interested in, which is why portals still exist and probably always will.
"Final" means the set that will end the match, not necessarily the fifth set.
Think like that and you will save one dollar in computing power during normal operation and lose over nine thousand when you'll be forced to clean up mess after xss worm attack.
shabda spelled it correctly.

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/disingenuous
I think the article's correct but it's mistake is in ascribing motive to the lost dataset. The bottom line is that Global Warming traces its origins back to a study done on a dataset that is now incomplete. But the fact that there's only one dataset isn't exactly a conspiracy.

When talking about Global Warming we're talking about measuring a really small number over a really, really big surface area. That's a far bigger job than most people think. All the equipment has to be calibrated exactly, in sync, and distributed across the globe.

And as I said the numbers are relatively small. Global Warming asserts a 1.33 degree increase in temperature over the last Century. To put that in perspective the difference between standing on asphalt during a sunny day or standing on concrete during a sunny day is about 3 degrees (because the concrete reflects where as the asphalt absorbs)

So it's not some big conspiracy. There's probably only one set of equipment in the world capable of measuring what needs to be measured which is why there's only one dataset available. How parts of it got lost is anyone's guess but I can't imagine in was done with malicious intent or that the study based on that dataset was purposely inaccurate (or at least I don't want to imagine that)
Wolfram's Search Goal: Compute All
This study is also explained in Dan Ariely's book "Predictably Irrational".
that's awful man. i'm very sad for you. .i wish you the best
In his Conclusions of Law, Judge Jackson showed them to be in violation of sections 1 and 2 of the Sherman Act by being a monopoly and engaging in tying. A 'crime' is an act in violation of law, the Sherman Act is a law, and they were in violation of it.

How are these facts changed by the case being brought before the court as a civil action?
What separates 37signals and Twitter?
Opening up blog comments on a relatively popular website doesn't necessarily encourage discussion. See Youtube, TechCrunch, or really any others. Popular bloggers like Andrew Sullivan have shut down their comments precisely because they prefer a more personal conversation via email rather than the anonymous name calling and hate spewed in your average comment section.

I happen to think there is a place for comments. But I assume by default that most comment sections are open first, then closed because of the vitriol. That stuff takes a real emotional toll over time.
Hate Seth Godin all you want(at times I too cannot resist). Yet, some of the smartest people I've run into were mentored by him. In general, he really can teach how to connect with your users.
It shouldn't, you can just have something like static.example.com/picture-of-cat-playing-piano-0123456789abcdef0123456789abcdef.jpg
Face brick also insulates the building.
> A 'crime' is an act in violation of law

No. A crime is an act in violation of criminal law. From wiki (apologies in advance) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime -- "While every crime violates the law, not every violation of the law counts as a crime."
But the point was that the decision interacts with the market, though. Obviously testing is good and omitting testing completely is bad. But at the end of the day the someone or something needs to pay for the software. Software vendors that ship late due to elaborate design and testing regimes get paid less, in practice, than the "duct tape" folks who beat them to market.

The video drivers you mention are a good example: an aerospace customer is almost certainly operating on a slower schedule, and probably has contracted the revenue already. The value of time to market here is less. And of course the value of code quality in a vehicle safety application is much higher than it is in a consumer web app.

So I'm not surprised at all that sane and smart people would make different testing decisions in the two regimes. They're both right.
99 billion?

a business plan?

being profitable?

number of users?

- * the better question is what doesn't (would be a smaller list)..
>> If you're in Europe, go see some glaciers in the Alps while you still can - they won't exist for much longer.

...said the man opposed to the spread of fear, uncertainty and doubt.
Locksmiths Croydon
Locksmiths in London and all surrounding areas including; Croydon, Sutton, Bromley, Fulham, Hammersmith, Chelsea, Sutton, Clapham, Balham, Wandsworth.
See, this is one of the things I love about Vim: there's always something new to learn! Somehow I had overlooked "K" to go to man pages. The other thing I love about Vim is the excellent documentation! I wanted to know more about "K" so I typed ":help K" and learned that, for example, if you're editing Ruby and would rather use 'ri' in place of 'man', all you have to do is add ":set keywordprg=ri" to your .vimrc (and if you have the ruby.vim files, it's already done for you).
There's Scientific correctness, and then there's risk. The likelihood is that the science is correct, so the risk is high.

Look at it this way, play Russian roulette - you can't prove that you're going to shoot yourself in the head, but that doesn't make it safe. Nope, corrective action should be taken against the risk.

The science should continue. Until there's a good body of scientific evidence that what we're doing is safe (and at the current rate, that's very unlikely), there will still be the need for change.
One creates their own linkbait, the other their users do it for them.
Twitter still needs to pick up an overly-opinionated metrosexual nordic hacker.
This is why it is so important to have vesting of founders shares. Then when they are no longer participating in the company there is an equitable manner for how many shares you end up with.

In my first company we arranged vesting over 4 years, 1/4 each year. Some people might prefer 3. Many investors will also insist on this as well.
Regulatory capture may always exist to varying degree. To lessen the effect takes involvement.

I fail to see how my view is naive. You only have two choices: "get involved" or "do nothing". I am fully aware most people do nothing (except complain). However, the stats from 2008 elections show significant increase in involvement.

Your view of "democracy in a nutshell" is "democracy performing poorly". It is your choice to take the pessimistic view that it will remain this way. My view is that democracy is a process, not a product.
What was really going on was that J&J put their long-term interests ahead of their short-term interests. It was not as big risk for them to do so as the writer implies, because they knew their brand was damaged by an external factor rather than something they had done themselves - quite different from the contrasting example of Perrier, where the problem was in their supply chain.
Thanks for the response. How stealthy can they really be about it, though? If it's common knowledge that this is how the government will respond, would this time-delay effect be negated? Wouldn't everyone know that dollars are being pumped, and start raising their prices to compensate? Just trying to wrap my head around this stuff...
There should be a github for scientific data. Hell, just use github!
AT&T has activated iPhone MMS
Yeah, that, and the whole "making money" thing.
Twitter confirms major cash boost
How is Brand in Public different from say Mahalo or even Squidoo. The content is similar: http://www.mahalo.com/home-depot

Is the problem people have with the fact that he's charging to give access to some of that content?

Also, this really reminds me of the local business scam MerchantCircle is running. They'll register a domain with your company name and aggregate content making a legit looking site which as you can imagine confuses a lot of people.
It would be funnier if it were true. Instead this would run in the command line.
if you liked the article, the author also does the excellent Comics Curmudgeon blog in his spare time, http://joshreads.com
surely you don't want to "win" via nitpicking. that would be a hollow victory at best, i think.

i chose the word "crime" because the comment i was replying to used it.
Thanks for that, it was a real eye-opener.
Redorb already covered that before me so I didn't.

Besides, Twitter will eventually make money; it caters to too many of the seven deadly sins not to.
I RTFA and it seems the author is confused. The announcement 3 years ago was that Jeff invested in them, that's all. And like Amazon, 37Signals is pretty traditional and I see no indication of some "big idea" on the horizon, other than the big idea of running a profitable/growing/thriving business.

There's also no meat to the article, just a "hey what's up with that?" comment in regards to over-valued web companies and 37signals strong conviction to staying ... real.
Receding glaciers refute the hypothesis that "there is no global warming"

This statement isn't as obvious at you make it seem. A large part of the controversy is what constitutes Global Warming, as opposed to regional. Oddly, by making the statement that receding glaciers are incontrovertible evidence of global warming, you are challenging the current consensus.

Much of the question about Climate Change is whether the current climate change is 'unprecedented', and therefore more likely to be correlated with human activity. The current consensus says that the Medieval Warming Period, a period where all parties agree that there was glacial retreat, was only a regional event.

Differentiating global warming from regional warming is very difficult, and is focus of this piece. Anecdotal evidence about retreating glaciers doesn't help to clear it up --- what's needed are global datasets as referred to in the article. I believe this is actually why McIntyre started researching the datasets in the first place: he was wondering why the graphs of global warming had 'erased' the MWP.

(And while the piece is certainly biased, I wouldn't call it FUD. Etymologically, this makes no sense. If anything, rather than spreading Fear, it's encouraging complacency in the face of what might be a true catastrophe. CUD maybe?)
For what it's worth, the GUI shown in jurassic park was a real system from SGI http://sgistuff.g-lenerz.de/movies/jpark.php .

Granted, it's pretty unrealistic that it would be used in a production system, much less the security controls for an island full of dinosaurs, but it was a real program.
You're quoting the Examiner? Really?
Who leaked Sony’s future plans?
In San Francisco, plans to start news web site