skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well, perhaps uncle Bob should read not only Joel's column but also Peter's book. JWZ is not alone in that book (Coders at Work) about not using fancy stuff. C++ gets a pretty universal smackdown from all there. In fact, one of the hackers there preferentially codes in assembly, because C is not close enough to the machine.

There are many nuggets there about IDE, unit testing, proof of program correctness, literate programming, design patterns. My reading of the book is that if your gig is agile or TDD or templates, you will have a cold audience in those coders. Even if you bring it on with attitude.
So this time you decided to preemptively complain about that complaining? (Which hasn't happened in this thread yet)

Regardless, $100m seems like an awful lot :/
I know... I thought the same thing but I tried it for the hell of it and it just flows faster IMO.
Quicksilver is basically a dead project. The lead developer now works on Google Quick Search Box. Open source contributors periodically write patches to keep the thing alive, but most of the plugins and such haven't been updated in ages.

Use Spotlight or LaunchBar or Google QSB.
> What you're saying is that this is a good deal for people who are already locked into Microsoft technologies.

No, this is about new companies. If you prefer using Microsoft technologies (e.g. C# and LINQ, MS SQL, ASP.NET MVC) Microsoft would like to take economic considerations out of the equation for new companies (same as they do with BizSpark).
Yes, this is fascinating. I have found another report on the WOW! signal:
http://www.bigear.org/Wow30th/wow30th.htm
Again, I don't think that this is a technical thing; but a corporate strategy thing. We didn't hear about this from some developer's blog; we heard about it from an "official" Google blog. At some point, this thing has been blessed for release under the Google umbrella.
As someone who has used both frameworks extensively, I like to add an interesting tidbit:

Considering my Rails work: I visited rubyonrails.org only once, when I first heard about it - it's primary focus isn't as a resource site and I don't know any other Rails developers that use it as one.

Considering my Django work: I had djangoproject.com open practically all the time, every day, since it's a primary destination for everything related to the project.
It's not a useful phrase, because nobody knows what it means, and the words "begging the question" themselves don't make sense as a description of the fallacy.
If you're wondering whether either party in this discussion has any new insights or ideas to share that you haven't heard of before, do yourself a favor and completely ignore all of this masturbation.

Here, I'll summarize the conversation:

"Quit dicking around and ship!"
"Sure, but you don't want me to ship shit!"
"C++ sucks!"
"C++ sucks, but sometimes it's a necessary evil!"

There, saved you an hour.
> This is an unusual phenomenon

I don't think that's unusual at all. I've found it to often be the case. Cache misses will kill performance.
To be fair it also may be the architecture that they've chosen for IE and windows. My understanding is that bits of IE form part of the windows O/S by it's use of COM: I'm guessing that Microsoft would like to honor a lot of the interfaces for these components.
I think I found it, it was a law book.

http://lists.essential.org/1995/info-policy-notes/msg00019.h...
Honda unveils 'Segway-style' unicycle that travels in any direction you want
If they don't realize what it actually is. There are a fair number of people out there who don't want to use another browser because it's confusing to them, or they like IE.

A website could just put a big "Speed up this application" button that installs the Chrome Frame plugin, and as far as the end-user is concerned, it's just like installing Flash - and they're still "using" internet explorer.

The target audience for this is not the people who are interested in Chrome; it's the people who aren't interested in moving away from IE.
Russian nuclear brinkmanship logic: If you knew we could do it, then you wouldn't cause it to happen. But you don't know we can because if you knew it then you could stop us from doing it. But we know we can, so we won't cause you to cause us to do it, because that would be bad.
Alternative, you could just practice not breaking shit.

Two erroneous assumptions in your thesis are that 1) unit tests catch all stupid little errors so you can stop worrying about them, and 2) the time spent chasing down stupid little errors that would have been caught by your tests is made up for by the cost of creating those tests in the first place.

Unit tests are not magic fairy dust. Having them does not make your code bug-free and even if something is covered by a test it is still possible that both the test and the code are wrong in the same way. Putting too much belief in correctness due to tests passing can be just as bad as not having any tests at all. Unit tests are great at api boundaries and points of interface between data-munging code, but every function or process does not need its own unit test.

Unit tests also have a high up-front cost that is frequently not justified by the return on this investment. There is a subtle art to selecting the granularity of testing that takes a while to learn, and spending too much time around TDD zealots will often lead coders who have not learned this skill to waste time writing tests instead of getting things done.

Like IDEs that flag type errors, compiler warnings, and debugger breakpoints, a test is just a tool. If you can't write working, maintainable code without any of these tools then perhaps you should spend more time honing your craft instead of collecting another crutch.
This isn't about treating developers as idiots. It's about subsidising the cost of starting contracting/a new company using Microsoft technologies so that you can build up some profits before licensing costs become an issue.
They got a point. IE has its own venerabilities and Chrome has some too, maybe less maybe more. Also we can factor the plugin since it can have its own security risks. So statically IE using the Chrome Frame is more exposed then IE alone.

It sounds like MS are clutching but they still raise a valid point.

BTW
I can't remember hearing that Mozilla are complaining about IE Tab.
I wonder what they think of the Adobe Flash Player.
Brain Scans Reveal What You’ve Seen
Original paper at:

http://dx.doi.org/10.1021/jp7112297
I remember having read that before; will take a new look and implement the good parts in my code.

Thanks!
The underlying fact is that Flickr users, many of whom are techy hipsters

awesome journalism
Our social networking fetish.
For the record one of the points I was trying to (perhaps badly) make in the post (it's from my blog) is that I don't think it takes the economic considerations out of the equation. When I talk to developers their economic consideration is on the deployment side not on the development side. I don't think most people care that much about the cost of their developer tools as much as they care about the Windows 2008 license they'll need for every server
That's a lot of words spent explaining the problem five times over, and none whatsoever describing the solution - just two paragraphs about a mysterious "device" that has to be contacted over the network to run this wondrous 100GB-JVM.

Having a JVM that transparently executes your app on a remote server is an interesting idea that might be useful for some kinds of apps and very bad for others, but I can't see what it has to do with the problem of JVMs not making use of lots of RAM.

All in all, it sounds like a rather contrived setup to justify selling a very expensive hardware dongle instead of a straightforward server.
This makes sense. The bank is doing what it should be doing, by bringing the matter through proper legal channels. If Google just handed over the information, they would be liable to the account holder. I personally hope that the legal system finds the bank was negligent and denies access to the guy's personal information.

Also, what are the 1,300 bank customers doing about this? I'm sure that a class-action suit will be filed against the bank.
This is completely new!
Or overall search volume is increasing driving them closer together. Useless graph without numbers of left axis.
Maybe they should've made a Yahoo logo especially for Flickr. The purple staggered lettering does sort of clash with the blue and red flickr logo.
Smoot-Hawley was "letting things stabilize"? What about the ERA and Reconstruction Finance (spending on infrastructure like Hoover Dam)? How about bailouts for financial institutions and subsidized home loans?

It's too bad Hoover let things stabilize on their own. One wonders what might have happened if he actually did something!
MongoDB: A Light in the Darkness
09_kev's profile
I'm beginning to think that Keynesian economics is a lot like communism: "It's never worked because no one was doing it right."

Maybe it just can't be done right. Maybe the problem is people.
Absurd to use either the site traffic or search term ranking comparison.

I will say, in san fran at most of the recent startup-y events i have attended rails has been far more represented than django. now this isn't scientific either by any stretch ...just a sense from real world engagement.
Nice tip. Quicksilver doesn't react as quickly on Snow Leopard it seems. It also doesn't have a calculator which Spotlight and Launchbar both have.
Buffet isn't buying based on the expected performance of the stock price + dividends? Maybe buffet has a longer time horizon than most investors, but that's the only real difference I can see.
The Sun could be heading into period of extended calm
springsource.org. framework website, not season.
If you're familiar with these laws: if I misaddress something to a PO Box, will the government reveal the identity of the accidental recipient? Will they if I ask nice, or must a court compel them? Is there any sort of requirements that need to be met?

I realize that in this case they haven't asked for anything beyond identity yet. But I'm forced to wonder what happens after they've ascertained identity?

There's no need to compel Google to reveal that person's identity unless there's a follow-up action that they feel they can't execute unless they know the identity of the unintended recipient.

So what is the follow-up action of stripping away this innocent person's privacy? I'm forced to conclude it would be yet-another injustice.
Ask HN: I want to learn Ruby 
Hi HN,

I want to learn Ruby, and after I gain some experience or find it interesting, I want to do Rails. What's the best way to learn Ruby? Kindly suggest some good books or manuals.
Jamie Zawinski explained that the most of the bad code was introduced by the people of Collabra, that was acquired by Netscape and ended up leading the new development efforts for version 4 of the browser. These people had no experience in writing multi-platform code, and added a lot of the bad features that we came to hate during the browser wars. And the email component he wrote was never really used.
The question really is "who is the target of this program" If it's people who were already sold on Microsoft technology than it's just a nice thing to do. If they are trying to woo other developers away from open source solutions the approach they've taken comes across as "we think we're outsmarting you"
I think it's a matter of psychological leap (or the absense thereof).

Changing browsers requires aquiring new habbits. Most people don't like change. On the other hand, they're already familiar with the concept of a browser plugin thanks to Flash and Accrobat. The Google Chrome Frame can be understood as a speed booster and a bunch of additional features for IE rather than a new browser.

Edit: Icey burn me to it.
This one squares with the way things seem to me:

http://trends.google.com/trends?q=ruby+rails%2C+django+pytho...

Rails slacking off, particularly as it gets more mature and in the middle of the Rails 3 refactoring. Django gaining some steam.
Ugh. Don't bother with Google QSB. Given its pedigree I had high hopes for it, but it ended up being even slower than pre-Leopard Spotlight.
Txteagle: MTurk competitor with a twist
Speed. Quicksilver is fast, QSB is sloooooooooooow.
As much as I hate to quote the zen of python:

Now is better than never.
Although never is often better than right now.
But, as the system grows, your ability to add or change functionality without breaking things

I disagree unless all your changes are really shallow. You change the structure of your application in significant ways and you'll break the tests too. So now you have two problems.
own management software, using boto (http://code.google.com/p/boto/)
I have no doubt that this deal exists because this market is highly competitive with many solutions available for nothing. I wish Microsoft luck and hope that the competition continues.

There will be some customers that this deal will be right for, and it will definitely help some startups.
In Joel Spolsky’s recent blog he talks about "Duct Tape Programmers".

I'm not sure I trust anyone that doesn't know the difference between a "blog" and a "post".
Talk about scalling an operation. How many companies have one million employees?
37signals is worth $100 billion
You can't go wrong by picking up a copy of "The Ruby Programming Language" and "Agile Web Development with Rails". Between those two books you should be a master in no time.
Of course, many corporate Web sites are so poorly designed that every URL is longer than 80 characters and thus may be mangled in email.
I've got an admin interface to an ecommerce website. The admin screen gives access to all sorts of entities: series of videos, individual videos, copies of DVDs, customers, wiki pages, etc.

Let's say that there are 40 different types of entities.

I could write custom views for each of these.

Or, using Ruby's reflection, I had them all share common views which then use reflection to figure out the basic data and the relationships between data types.

E.g.:

<% reflections = item.class.reflections.select {|key, val| [ :has_one, :has_many, :belongs_to, :has_and_belongs_to_many ].include?(val.macro) }.to_array
reflections.each do |key,val|
if ! reject.include?(key)
%>
<h1> <%= key.to_s %></h1>
<% bullet_pts = item.send(key).to_array
if bullet_pts.empty?
%>
<span style="padding-left:25px;"><i>none</i></span>
<% else %>

<ul>
<% bullet_pts.sort_by {|x| x.methods.include?(:name) ? x.name : 0}.each do |subitem| %>
<li><%= linktext = subitem.respond_to?(:name) ? subitem.name : (subitem.respond_to?(:text) ? subitem.text : subitem.id )
# TJICFIX P3: this is an ugly way to specify a link. do it better!
link_to(linktext, :controller => subitem.class.to_s.pluralize.underscore, :action=>:show, :id =>subitem.id) + "<br>" %>
<% end %>
</ul>
<%
end # if "none" else "lots!"
end # if ... reject
end # reflections.each
%>

With the above as a partial, and one other that's similar, a full view for a very very complicated object becomes this:

<%= render (:partial => 'admin/shared/show_basicdata', :locals => { :item => @item }) %>
<%= render (:partial => 'admin/shared/show_relations', :locals => { :item => @item, :reject => [:category_courses] }) %>

I'm reworking this approach for a new project right now. The new code goes beyond "index" and "show" views to "edit" and "create" views. Also, because most of the controllers are pretty similar, except for business logic, I'm also about to start compressing those down with metaprogramming (except for callbacks, which will vary).

In this particular codebase, I think that the expansion to rewrite it in Perl would be much more than 20x. Maybe more like 100x ... or 200x.
Press release: 37Signals valuation tops $100 billion after bold vc investment
37signals Valuation Tops $100 Billion After Bold VC Investment
Did you try asking about it on the community forum?
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/forums/forum.jspa?forumID=...
Ah, yes, the "I don't have to write tests because I'm perfect" school of programming.

Well, I'm not perfect, but I aspire to write perfect code, that is, code which has no bugs. One way of doing that is writing unit tests - telling the computer what to do, and then telling it how to check what I just told it to do. A better way is making sure I'm using abstractions that match my intentions.

Aside: I see TDD as a little different from regression testing, which seems to make a little more sense.
There are more than 1B people online.
Hm... I wonder when REE 1.87 will be made publicly available? My team is looking to move to 1.87, and I'd rather like to hold off for REE 1.87 if possible.
I added Drupal in that mix as well and was pleasantly surprised. I disagree that there is less money in custom development though. All the Drupal developers (and I know a fair amount) I know are buried in work...
37Signals valuation tops $100 Billion after bold VC investment
I thought QS had a calculator plugin. At least I think I remember using a QS-based caluclator… in any case, I definitely have to agree that LaunchBar is a superior product at this time.
I can't stand Quicksilver. I've found it to be a giant memory leak (routinely using 500mb - 1gig of ram!), and will randomly freak out and try to re-index my whole disk causing it to thrash and slow everything down.

Spotlight seems to do all I need and I haven't even noticed it's indexing since upgrading to Snow Leopard.

Also, if you spend most of your day in Terminal and a code editor, what bonus do you get from Quicksilver? I don't really launch that many programs.
WHO CARES?
I have some idea of how easy it is to embed IE into apps, so I am going to assume it's at least the same order of easiness to embed Chrome into IE. I think it's fairly trivial, though perhaps unpleasant work.
I tried looking at the source code, but I don't use GIT so I gave up. It's part of Chromium: http://code.google.com/chromium/

EDIT: After considering your profile page I fold :)
> Ruby and Perl are similar enough that I'm pretty sure I can take a "maintainable" program in either one and port it to the other with minimal changes

Without intending to flame, I can't imagine that you'd say this if you've used some of the more powerful techniques in Ruby.

If you've used techniques X,Y, and Z in Perl, you can find them in Ruby. ... but unless you think in a Lisp-like way, you won't even realize that techniques G' and E''' exist in Ruby, but not in Perl.
Good for yahoo, lets see those techy hipsters flock to photobucket where freedom reigns.
I tried for a while (unsuccessfully) to get any sort of graphics working with Lisp. Do any of the games in here use graphics? I feel like some really awesome "math art" could be made with Lisp.
So we've lost (past tense) a part of the vocabulary -- no one knows what it means anymore, but that's okay because it clearly wasn't useful for communicating the idea in question, since nobody knows what it means.

That almost sounds like a circular argument.
Words have to make sense separately from what they mean? Maybe you're saying that the phrase doesn't mean the same thing as the literal meaning of the words? What about all the other phrases that mean something apart from the literal meaning of the words; would you have us stop using them, as well? :)
I'd like to suggest a new category for killfiled sites / submissions - ones that get to stay live but don't gain karma when other people try to submit them.

The recent submission flood of "37signals valuation tops $100 billion after bold VC investment" shows how this kind of dreck ends up on the front page - it's not from people agreeing, but people submitting blindly.
For OS X you can use Color Oracle (http://colororacle.cartography.ch/) or Sim Daltonism (http://michelf.com/projects/sim-daltonism/) to see your designs as a person with various types of color blindness would. I would hope that such software exists on other platforms, but I’ve never checked.
I guarantee you that MSFT is working hard to make JS faster,

Then why haven't they made it as fast as a grad student volunteer did in 2 months for FireFox [1]? This kind of stuff has been pretty well researched in the past couple of decades :-P

1. Scroll to "How We Did It", here: http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roadmap/archives/2008/08/trac...
A friend recently switched to the mac, and I recommended QS to her after years of being happy with it. The discussion then ensued about why QS is better than Spotlight, and the best I could come up with is that I like the fact that QS can be configured to show up in the center of the screen. The configurability and wealth of plugins is nice, but to be honest I don't use many of them, so it's not a huge deciding factor.
I was in your exact situation a couple of months ago. I recently built my first app, by the guidance from this post.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=679959
Does it even benefit Yahoo to put their finger-prints on Flickr?
Around DC, there are several such, including Peapod (operated by Giant) and Safeway.com. I've used both, and while neither have a great selection or a perfect web interface for shopping, they do okay if you take the inherent limitations into account (don't order produce or breakables, and assume they'll fail to stock sufficient quantities of low-margin things, like 2L soda, in my experience).
Ask HN: Re: 37 Signals - List of successfully bootstrapped tech startups?
I'm guessing the 8+ submissions of the 37 Signals/Twitter satire were killed due to fatigue. It makes sense, the argument surrounding the VC vs. bootstrap model in the context of the Mint buyout generated 300+ comments, often heated.

Instead of rehashing the same arguments can we look at this empirically?

lets create a list of successful (defined by exit or long term profitability) tech start ups that haven't taken VC. Then we can compare it to the portfolios from the top 5-10 VC's. It won't conclude anything, but at least we can argue facts instead of opinions.

I'll gladly put together a comparison site if we can generate enough names:

Successful tech start ups that haven't taken VC:

1. Craigslist.org

2. PlentyOfFish.com

3. MyBlogLog.com

4. ClubPenguin.com (angel)

5. Threadless.com (took on a small amount of expansion capital, but was profitable before hand)

Others?
There are certain corporate websites that work better or only on IE. People may not want to switch between 2 browsers & so stick with IE>
Even Java has reflection... :-)

What is the Ruby-unique feature not existing in e.g. Moose?

(I'm not a real web programmer these days, but is it still common to template with code PHP-style, like that?)

Edit: Emphasis on my point, since I only got an answer to my humorous note that these days, most languages have reflection functionality.