skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
But surely you're not saying, categorically, that software architecture is pointless?

Not at all, only that Frank Gehry might be a poor analogy to enlighten people about the value of software architecture and design. "Duct tapers good" vs. "architecture astronauts bad" is surely a false dichotomy and a horrible analysis of the situation. Here's an example that might shed better light on the real situation: Microsoft is crawling with duct tapers, and Apple takes design seriously. Microsoft is much wealthier, but I prefer to use Apple products, and I wouldn't want to work at Microsoft.
You missed the joke.

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/ingenious
First paragraph: true. But have you tried exit from vim without looking at the manual? It reminded my Borland's Ctrl-k ctrl-d days.

I've used vim/cream on 256MB P3 1GHz laptop to edit files of size in range many hundreds MB. It worked well. If I remember correctly eclipse didn't even start on it.

I've used vim from Linux distribution written on one (but little nonstandard) 3.5" diskette to repair not booting system.

In short: YMMV
You don't actually say that no real developers use TDD, but you seem to imply that by focusing on the fact that the teachers, authors, consultants and trainers that promote it "loudest" are earning money via the teaching, authoring, consulting and training in which they loudly promote it. Bit of a catch-22 there, no? Since if their job involves communication about programming topics you automatically ignore the message and you'll only listen to those not trying to communicate.

Luckily, I just finished reading this article by one of the Twisted guys in relation to the recent release of Tornado which, in passing, sings the praises of TDD, basically calling it essential for the work they do:
http://glyph.twistedmatrix.com/2009/09/diesel-case-study-in-...
I want a desktop OS that runs web apps so well that it obviates the need for a browser, not an app that runs in the browser that emulates my current desktop OS.
Impressive work and I don't want to be discouraging but I think that transferring the Desktop paradigm to the web is probably not the best way of building powerful web interfaces
I think people are more or less ignoring IRRELEVANT ads.
Does the judge have an Gmail account? I may want to send some sensative information there and the ask him how should I deal with that.
There's absolutely no reason for it to have been done. That type of information should only be available to pre-approved, secured email addresses. And that certainly should be a company.com address, not gmail.com.

The only plausible "excuse" would be that an employee decided to take a shortcut thinking that no harm would be done (and no one would know) and had a "oh f*ck!" realization when it went to the wrong address (and don't they wish they were using GMail with Undo!). This is still unacceptable. If it was a common and accepted practice, it's inexcusable.
No he doesn't...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Ware_(judge)#Noted_ruling...
I think people on this board especially understand that something as simple as an email account can directly affect our means of making a living and can have very serious consequences, therefore we understand that a blanket deactivation could be the equivalent of "to help me fix my mistake, you must lose your job."

To non-geeks loosing an email account isn't as big of a deal, so it's easy to see why a judge would not realize the significance.
seriously?

You have to know perl's control flow ("unless"

unless is that difficult to understand? Its plain english has totally understandable semantics without reading a lick of documentation about perl.

you have to know perl references(->)

This is just like C++ and an arrow is pretty dang readable and plain to me. Perhaps even more informative than a period.

you have to know perl's variable prefixes.

I might be convinced to give you this one but really reading the perl code isn't that difficult even with 3 extra symbols to know. Even not knowing the symbols the code example you show is both readable and concise.

Yes perl may have some quirks but for the most part it "Does exactly what you think it would by reading it". That was a design goal of the language after all.

Of course anyone could write perl code that is incomprehensible and makes use of perls semantics to obfuscate their purpose (using every example you cite) but that is with effort on their part and significant effort in some cases. And just to drive the point home may I present lua code that is way harder to read than any perl code I've ever seen even in an obfuscated perl contest: http://www.corsix.org/content/obfuscated-lua

To reiterate, no one in their right mind would right lua code like that except as an exercize and experiment. Same thing goes for perl. The perl code you show above is perfectly readable. Unless does exactly what you expect it to. -> arrows mean exactly what you would expect them to. Arrays start at 0 exactly like most programmers expect them to. and on top of that its readable. The only point you bring up that I think supports you argument is the @_ and argument passing semantics. But again that's only one and as another poster pointed out Lua has at least one also in it's array indexing.
That's me. Thanks, I accept! Do I get a sash or a garter or something?
As a user, I typically love encountering sites that are OpenID enabled (stackoverflow, gitorious, ...) since then I can use my livejournal account to login. This way I don't have to manage yet another username/random-password pair.
Does anyone think that more relevant or interesting ads are a good solution?

I agree that CPM is broke. People really don't like ads, as evidenced by the popularity of AdBlocker. Paying to show people a lot of something that they hate doesn't make a lot of sense.
> By advocating inaction, you are expressly taking the side of the denialists, even though you claim not to agree with them, technically.

So what? If a particular response is "correct", why does it matter who else advocates said response? Why does it even matter what their reasons are?

Surely you're not arguing that we should do dumb things because ugly people say otherwise....

BTW - you've got things backwards. It isn't "go along with us because we're good people", it's "we're good people because we do good things". If you're pushing bad science....
Have you ever seen an encrypted email sent to a wide audience?
Imagine the consequence if it was sent via an old-fashioned method: snail mail or fax. Clearly the remedy would not be to destroy the home, office or deactivate the phone line of the receiver. It's an extremely poor understanding of technology but sadly, not at all surprising.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billion

International news avoids the term "billion" because it can refer to 10^9 or 10^12.

In UK English, 10^9 is called a milliard.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milliard
Sydney’s Apocalyptic Dust Storm Seen From Space
If we are not headed out of town:

- Clean up around the house / garage / yard-work

- Wash the truck if needed

- Watch a movie or sports (I like to set aside time for at least one football game if possible)

- Read lazily into the afternoons

- Videogames if time allows - my ps3 is collecting dust and a couple of unopened games...
I wonder.. the easy reaction to this is "Don't use a third party for your e-mail" which is easy enough if you're a geek, but then if you have your own server/domain, could you end up with a court order taking your server or domain off the air under similar circumstances?
This kind of stuff only happens in America
Well, if you have some empathy then you can admire somebody for their good qualities while at the same time being aware of their faults.

The existence of free/open source software owes a big debt to RMS's idealogical extremism, and Emacs, GCC and GNU are pretty major (and admirable) achievements in programming. That's why I say I admire RMS, even if I wouldn't want him to date my sister.
I hope you are working for you own company. If not, maybe you should be...
When I first switched to my Mac, when I'd switch between split windows (ctrl w w), I'd often accidentally close my Terminal session (command w). The Apple Command sat where I expected ctrl to be.
First, the name is "Perl" -- "perl" is the executable. If you have written so much Perl, you should know this.

>>I highlighted several in that one tiny perl example.

You can highlight lots of examples by choosing how to write the code. The Perl code could be very similar to the Lua.

But, yeah... the linguistic inspirations gives more syntactic ways to write things. That is not only bad, but (as TFA said), you better follow the "Best Practices" book.

All that is anyway dwarfed by the language specific libraries you use, as soon as you do something interesting.

Personally, I think the worst part of Perl is all the painful trolling you have to suffer on the discussion web sites...

>>A nonstandard default array index is one piece of trivia.

Hmm... that would in fact be really weird. I have lots of habitual loops over indexes etc which I'd have to change, lots of edge cases. It would be like driving a car where you turn the wheel left to turn right -- but only on Mondays.
Let's just call it 30.5 gigabarrels, and be through with it. :)

Still, thanks for pointing that out.
"At this point, the plume had stretched 2,700 miles, roughly the width of the continental United States." - Does this happen in Sydney often?
I'm not sure that I think shrooms or LSD are good for programming per se, but they're very good for the larger goal of solving problems. They let you look at things with no preconceptions, like a child. You are able to playfully consider different perspectives and approaches in a way that can give you some great insights. However, you'll want to be careful about how much you take; the problem isn't that there is any kind of danger, but simply that at higher doses you'll be having too much fun to focus on whatever problem you're interested in solving.
Putting guns to people's heads is what govts do.
That's pretty funny. For many years I've kept a (mental) Post-It note on my electronics bench with "WWWD?" written on it.
Practice capoeira, spin poi and contact staff, contact juggle, read, program my own projects, play Dungeons and Dragons and see moview with friends. In general, live.
Biggest sales management coaching mistakes
The reference stuff is natural to old C programmers, if they think a bit. It is ugly, but will just take some work hours to learn.

All that is dwarfed by learning the language specific libraries, no matter which language you use.

And by the way, use strict/warnings, so you aren't bitten by a spelling error for variable names. :-)

Edit: BTW 2, how do you do one-liners in Python? :-)
I've always wanted to write a planetary simulator. I think clojure might be a decent language for it, as long as you avoid floating point as much as possible and use clojure's Ratios class instead.

user=> (type (/ 1 3))
clojure.lang.Ratio

user=> (* (/ 1 3) 3)
1

I'd really like to see an arithmetic macro for clojure to allow infix notation, constants, and lazy evaluation. Something like (arith 2m/s^2) would be crazy awesome.
:help si<CTL-D> (type :help space s i and control-d after the i)
will give you all available variations in help on si, including 'si' and si among many others.

CTL-D is a sort of intelli-suggest in context (except it's move 1/2 page down in command mode)

:help<CTL-D> gives variations of help in your installation.

:help <CTL-D> (help then space then control-D) gives more variations.

:help help<CTL-D> (ask for help on help, with a control-D immediately after the last p) gives more variations on help.

:help c_CTRL-D (literally typed just like that) is the help entry for using CTL-D on the command line.

:help CTRL-D<CTL-D> (everything up to the first D literally, then control-D) lists all the different help subjects for CTRL-D in various contexts.

:<CTL-D> (control-D immediately after typing colon) lists all the things you can do on the command line, including help.

Help.
that might probably make it an easier spam-target. and if i were pbworks - at some point the freemium model might have to equate to new user-registrations

~B
I look at the form of the argument presented. If it employs rhetorical fallacies, or lacks qualifiers to broad statements, or shies away from more than the most cursory contextual explanations, then it's probably bullshit.

Or in programming terms, watch out for undeclared variables, errors in scope, and abuse of the GOTO statement.
Agreed. It's like making a car that looks like a horse+cart. Fun to do, but no one would use it.
The bank was completely out of line to request this. What they should have done was to insure every single person on that list against identity theft for the rest of their lives. Then, if a significant number of them did have their identities stolen, request the identity of the gmail user; only then would their be evidence of wrongdoing on the part of the gmail address owner.
2. If I send a sensitive snail mail "accidentally" to the bank, can I get the court to lock down the bank's premises and order a search for my mail (and any copies of it)?

That is a good point if we assume that physical mail is the same as internet mail and if we assume that an email account is a location just like a physical location.
A random grab bag of spend time with my partner and friends, watch movies, read, code personal projects, blog and goof off online.

Some weeks I'm really energetic about progressing in my personal projects (or getting side tracked and coming up with new ones), lately though I've been avoiding computers.

Tonight I might drink, then try some drunk coding.
I think they are speaking of the Oberth Effect: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oberth_effect about which I know nearly nothing, but the multiplier at the end of the Wikipedia example is 3.3.

In brief, you let a planet pull you in to its gravity well, then while you are going very fast burn your fuel to get your Δv.

At this point my physics falls apart. You either…

1) Gain the energy from the propellent coming down and not having to go back up. (f=ma doesn't help me here)

2) Gain extra energy because the rocket force is constant and with a greater 'v' the kinetic energy is greater. (says whose frame of reference?)

3) Gain energy because you balance some equation and realize you left the exhaust at a lower altitude. (Dr. Carl Bender tried to pull this stuff on me in freshman physics. It looked good on him.)
This seems to be talking about the Oberth effect.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oberth_effect
Vehicle vinyl wrap
Many people are bored by the plain looking colors that they have on their cars. As a result, many persons decide to go in for different types of vehicle vinyl wraps.
For anyone interested in the history of Oil, The Prize by Daniel Yergen is a really interesting book.
AT&T Goes After Google Voice
Communications of the ACM is outstanding, every month it has great articles. Long may it continue.
It's about my ability to have a single ID if I want one.

I feel that my online ID is andrewducker.livejournal.com - it's been the centre of my online social life since 2001, it's where I keep in contact with my distributed friends, where I post things I think about. In a very real way, it's my defining online identity.

And now, thanks to OpenID, I can carry that identity with me to other sites. If I post on Stack Overflow I'm posting as _me_ - not just as whatever user id I happened to get in the gold rush.

That matters to me. If it doesn't matter to you then that's fine. But it's important to me.
It's mostly useful for ASCII diagrams, in conjunction with overwrite mode.
What the fuck was a bank doing sending the confidential information of thousands to a GMail account in the first place?

Maybe the employees were so irritated with Microsoft outlook they have been using Gmail instead. But seriously if I were a member of that bank I would be withdrawing my money right away. If there security procedures are so lax that they send a confidential email such as that through Gmail then they aren't responsible enough to hold anyone's money.
And sometimes move for an appellate court order staying the order of the trial court, if the trial court's order would have an irreversible bad effect.
Not really. A lot of European countries, particularly the UK, are a lot worse.
Hopefully they weren't sending social security numbers and account info to a wide audience.
Always ephemeral
typically dinner and drinks with a couple of friends friday night. catch up on sleep, wake up 10-11am saturday, clean up the apartment (more productive when it's clean!), take the puppy for a super-long walk, work on my blog (it pays more than my startup does, so gotta show it some love), keep working on the blog, go out for dinner with friends, wake up late sunday, finish working on blog, then back to startup work until 1-3am. then startup stuff during the week. more or less.
Why would people be accessing loopt from anything other than a mobile browser, which I'm assuming quantcast doesn't track?
Wrenching and racing. Occasionally programming, as it relates to wrenching and racing.
Watch children's soccer games after teaching my supplemental math lessons, at this time of year.
What Little I Can Talk about Feynman
Not really true. That indicates weather changes in certain areas but doesn't measure global weather changes which is what's called for when trying to assess the validity of man-made Global Warming.

Isolated weather changes like the ones you cite happen all the time on our planet.
I think you need to enhance your comprehension capabilities. Ohh wait wait, I see you are not from IIT, sorry please don't bother then! I said, what is wrong with "IIT circle"? If other universities don't have enough talented alumni to support each other, then what's wrong with IITs? Please stop blaming IITs for your own failures in life, IITs have nothing to do with that. If you are not competent enough, learn to admit.

Man, I seriously recommend you to come out of this grudge and look at this recent report: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/msid-3752658,...

I am utterly sorry for you my friend. After witnessing your witty and intelligent remarks, I feel you must have been admitted to IIT. You are amazing.

All in good faith :)

PS: I din't say students from other universities are all fools. But sad, your comment has made me to feel so.
I thought it was from shooting fish in a barrel?
I wonder if anyone has heard anything at all from the holder of the Gmail account? I mean it could very well be that the emails just ended up in spam, but I think it more likely that the email account simply isn't used anyway.

That said it is obvious that no one wants their email account to be terminated, especially not those who use it for business, and if the court has that power to simply deactivate someone's account then something is very wrong with our judicial system.
auto-x, scca, drag, what? i tinker with a mustang myself.
my guess: they don't.

but actually 5-10% stake and upper limit of 50000 should leave quite a bit of wiggle room...
According to Saul Klein, mentors are allowed in.

From: http://blog.seedcamp.com/2009/09/awaiting-moderation.html

"One quick factual point – of course mentors are able to attend the judging sessions, several did this year and have done every year. I think what happened yesterday was a pretty innocent misunderstanding – you came into the room mid-pitch and as you’d not been a mentor during the week, I guess that’s why Reshma asked very politely for you to not join the session."
Saul Klein's response is here: http://blog.seedcamp.com/2009/09/awaiting-moderation.html
The bank already screwed up by not following a privacy policy. That's why they ended up sending private information to a Gmail account.

Google did the right thing by showing the bank what it means to stick to a privacy policy.
"But more importantly, they have always been wrong in one direction, the direction of overstating the environmental damage done by human activity."

In most cases where the predictions have been wrong, they were only wrong because a law has was passed to fix the problem, as in the case of DDT, acid rain, rivers catching on fire, etc.

In just about every case where we haven't passed a law the predictions have come true... fishery deplition, rain forest destruction, mercury and pcbs in fish, etc.
Do you really hire or recruit people to work on your projects merely on the basis of reading code with no problem?

No, but everyone we hire must first pass through that stage. To become a Perl expert one must first spend quite some time as a Perl beginner.
mp3jeep01,

i like it too.

how about getting the list of cafes at yelp?

Also add tags to get an idea what a person's interests are.

by the way, which cafe do you usually work at? i'm up for coworking in the city. msg me at dannyroa _at_ gmail.
It seems to me that the person to appeal would be the holder of the Gmail account. If no one hears from him, which is likely (The Gmail account is probably abandoned), then nothing will happen.

I just hope that this doesn't set a precedent in future cases.
OT on bad or obscure jokes:

I have an image posted in my cube that is a pic of Bruce Schneier and the caption reads "Bruce Schneier knows the state of Schroedinger's cat"

Someone asked me to explain it to them so I talked about Schroedinger's cat and the Chuck Norris jokes. Then who Bruce Schneier is and tied it all up with quantum crytography.

After all that, she gave me a half-hearted smile and made some crack about my geekiness.

After thinking about her reaction for a second, I penned the following tweet.

"Having to explain why a joke is funny collapses it's waveform and then it's just words."

http://twitter.com/jaywgraves/status/3864172416
I know many non-geeks who would consider losing their email account a big deal and would be upset. More than just geeks rely on their online identities to talk and work.
Did I say its easy?

The point is that there is an organisation. And some people are responsible for security.

And yes, it will cost.
Aren't those supposed to be called "vacations"?
The problem is more general, that the current set of lawyers, policy makers and the like just aren't familiar with anything digital. Given 20 years, when the current law students/other 20-somethings, who have grown up with the Internet, iPhones and a constant connectivity to anyone you want, start getting into policy creating offices and sitting as judges, I expect to see many changes to the way issues like this are handled.
Now you sound sensible, unlike your previous comment. Good for you. You have been to Gatech, so for sure you know how profs each year plan to catch new IITians to work in their groups. But your personal ego has forced you not admit this.
I cannot help you with this.

Discloser: I have been to Gatech.
Using an email address for your OpenID is already possible, assuming your provider supports it. I haven't seen any great rush to support email OpenIDs, though, so it could be that most email providers just don't care.
And what of the 1,300 people? They should all be notified that their security was breached, AND they should be suing the bank.