skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The Kolmogorov complexity of COM is, at the very least, hundreds of kilobytes of itchy, fidgety, sensitive, and complicated code. The Kolmogorov complexity of xor'ing two pointers to save 32 bits is on the order of tens or hundreds of bytes. (I'm using the term a bit loosely, obviously, but I think it gets the point across.) I suppose it depends on the limit of "slightly", but in context I think it's clear we're talking about "techniques" that are more than a three line hack in your linked list library. YMMV. (That is, I do see the point you are trying to make.)

Presumably, the duct tape programmer is doing that because it is the difference between making the product go and not making the product go, not because they love bit packing. It's not a technique I'd adopt today, but Zawinski (just to choose one example from his repertoire I've read about) was trying to make machines with, say, 8MB of RAM able to read thousands of email messages. You get a bit nutty under those constraints, or you ship slow crap. There isn't much of a third choice. (Fast and featureless, maybe.)

(I think I can bid lower than 8MB of RAM, too, but I'm a bit fuzzy on netscape timeframes vs. ram timeframes. I think 4.0 was in the 32-64-128MB era, putting 3.0 a ways back, but I'm not sure.)
Major points for hacking the game before playing it.
Just turn it upside down. Left on the right, right on the left. Problem solved.
Anyone remember how cool MS Origami looked?

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6381789873197028811

Microsoft's commercials and reality don't intersect very well. History tends to repeat itself.
For people more typographically inclined, there is a much analysis and history of Arial at: http://www.ms-studio.com/articles.html
It is indeed epic. The aesthetic of Anonymous has always strongly reminded me of William Gibson's Panther Moderns. I don't know if that is just an example life imitating art or Gibson being prescient, again.

http://everything2.com/title/Panther+Modern
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Yeah, because no human being could possibly pronounce those crazy characters like む that aren't in [A-Z]...
A consequence of those rewrite side-effects:

Mozilla Firefox was forked from the rewritten Mozilla codebase

> Netscape 6.0 is finally going into its first public beta...Well, yes. They did. They did it by making the single worst strategic mistake that any software company can make: They decided to rewrite the code from scratch.

http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/releases/0.1.html

http://www.mail-archive.com/linux-users@linux-sxs.org/msg067...
I agree with the basic idea, but I think Joel is going over-the-top with the C++ hate. I've actually shipped real code that used the insanely complicated feature of C++ templates. Works great.

The problem is not with a specific language or technology -- it's using the bleeding edge technology, when the boring one will do.
PizzaHut did a similar thing a while back:

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/08/01/pizza-huts-delicious-ip...

Except it is more geared at remotely ordering a pizza to be delivered.
More technical details about Google Chrome Frame
I really wish there were fewer, smarmy, uninformed, superficial blog posts coming out of Silicon Valley. Then I'd be more inclined to agree with this post. Just to pick on one point (no. 2):

"People have figured out SOX just means companies should go the acquisition route. SV has adjusted to the idea of never IPOing"

As an alternative, I'd suggest that in fact the IPO window is suddenly there, which lifts all boats, including the acquisition boat. Thank you, OPEN.
Is that harder than $\int_{0}^{100} x^2 dx$? Your version is only 4 chars less, and mine looks more like the actual math...

LaTeX has the added advantage that most mathematicians have it in muscle memory. (I have latex in emacs muscle memory, so I have a hard time using mathim.)
Speaking as a Canadian as well, I don't understand how you can say that there isn't at least some large part of the US system that is "socialized". Look at Medicare spending or even VA hospitals. You would think that they would first want to fix what they should be doing right in the first place before trying to "fix" even parts of the system that aren't broken (they spend almost as much as Canadians do on a per capita basis on public healthcare on Medicare).

As for these problems you speak of. As an example I just tried to book a physical - the earliest possible appointment? March 10th! Another friend of mine needed to book an initial consult with another medical specialist and their first appointment is almost 17 months away. Sorry, I don't get how such a large percentage of Canadians seem not to understand how poorly our system works and how much better it could and how they are so ideologically opposed to the idea of at least having private options. It's not the rich who are inconvenienced since they just go down to the US and pay, but it's the middle class who are legally prevented from using private providers in Canada so we're stuck to wait.
Well, this post would've been up about 24 hours ago, but something was distracting me.
Exactly.

I'd been thinking of wanting something like this (I thought of it as a "social network for airports") for a while, so when I heard about it I was interested.

I would hardly call myself "high profile" BTW.
Super creepy anti-government murder in KY
hacker related if you're not white :\
And I suddenly regret taking I-90 on my last drive through SD. Damn!
and that my friends is a lot of saturated fat...
I'd be curious to see how you did this. Would you be willing to release the source code?
It's Official: Water Found on the Moon
"One principle duct tape programmers understand well is that any kind of coding technique that’s even slightly complicated is going to doom your project."

Like writing a custom compiler for your web app?

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/09/01b.html

After he jumped that shark I don't read anything he writes anymore.
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A Washington power grab at its finest. The FCC has announced that it, and it alone, is ruler of the internet, although of course the announcement was couched in terms of "openness". It will be interesting to see how this plays out in the courts against First Amendment issues, when they finally collide, as they will.
WSJ’s factually challenged argument against net neutrality
There is a problem with observing changes in a single protein and reversing them to see if it all fits again. Evolution doesn't necessarily changes single proteins - it changes whole pathways (that define a biological function) - that include a number of different proteins expressed from different genes. If scientists had changed all these proteins back to where they were in addition to reversing the 5 changes in glucocorticoid receptor, the old function would surely be restored.
The most interesting thing about this article to me is where the author got the data -- http://www.aggdata.com .

I ran across aggdata some time ago while looking for a list that they happened to provide for free. They provide niche data that they scraped from the internet. Their data is cheap enough that it's not worth trying to scrape the data yourself. I think the business model can be duplicated easily and there is plenty of room on the long tail.
Part of it is that memes transmit so rapidly now to a pretty large percentage of internet users thanks to Twitter, Facebook and friends. All the old ways to transmit memes (irc, SA, chans, ytmnd, etc) are still active too, but the lag time between meme creation and meme saturation is way smaller than it used to be. So people are naturally becoming accustomed to seeing them in more venues.

It's not like memes are unique to the internet (see: Sometimes the Dragon Wins, for example) but their speed of infection and increasingly large reach is quite astounding.
Our unique distributed architecture stitches together computers from all around the world to deliver exceptional crawling performance at an incredibly low cost.

Sounds like they've got a botnet :| Of course, I'm sure it's nowhere near as insidious. But are they piggybacking this on top of some other distributed computing platform or service? Can I contribute (and maybe get paid for my time)?

Edit: Do some basic research, Tim... http://gigaom.com/2009/05/14/80legs-cares-about-your-bandwid...
It probably has to do with fun and game balance. Like the real world where you might as well go home if you're not front-running and flash trading, if EVE allowed macros and automated trading then it could devolve into a competition between programmers to write the best bots. Regular human players might be all but shut out.
The irony is a lot of the points he makes are reasons to stay out of Silicon Valley. For example, he cites the "death" of VC money and how it's cheaper than ever to start a company. But proximity to VCs was one of the big reasons to move your company to the Valley and starting a company isn't that cheap if you're paying high rent for both home and office space.

Other than that the other points seem pretty superficial ("it's not cool to work for a big company", "SV entrepreneurs are getting really good").
For everything that's more efficient to automate, that's one less thing that's fun for players to do. There are more people who want to play EVE than who want to play write-software-to-play-EVE.
A list of programmers notable for their contributions to software
That graph screams credibility!
"He is the guy you want on your team building go-carts, because he has two favorite tools: duct tape and WD-40."

This phrase comes from watching too much Eastwood (Gran Torino ~ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1205489/) The idea behind it is you can jury-rig/fix almost anything with WD40 & duct tape alone without the need for fancy expensive tools.
There wouldn't be any downsides to automating it, which I think is the main issue. If there's no difference between the automated goods and the handmade goods...

I'm sorry, I had to stop there. My comment was freaking me out with parallels to reality. Anyway, I think a move like that would give way more credence to the "EVE is a spreadsheet" idea, which I'd assume CCP is sorta trying to avoid.
"As a general view, they have excellent memory and strong attention to detail. They are persistent and good at following structures and routines," he says. In other words, they're born software engineers."

Wrong, completely totally backwards!

Good software engineers need to be good at communicating. They need to be good writers. It also helps if they have terrible memories, because if they forget easily then they are forced to write code thats easy for them to follow and understand days or years later, and consequently the same for the rest of us working with them.
Wow, I just finished implementing a couple algorithms for binary De Brujin sequences in haskell and was working on a blog post when I read this. You can check out mine here if you want:

http://coder.bsimmons.name/blog/2009/09/cracking-a-lock-in-h...

We must have been reading the same articles on reddit which lead us to the same tengentially-related wikipedia page or something.
I've occasionally dug deep enough into exercise-inducded hypoglycemia to have very, very mild hallucinations, but mostly it just forces you off the bike; if you could go on exercising at that point, you'd be at risk of doing neurological damage, like someone injecting an OD of insulin. I'm familiar with Robic from other articles, and it seems pretty clear that his craziness is sleep-deprivation induced. He wins those multi-day "ultra" events more by sleeping much less than by going faster.
Simply because there isn't an up-to-date package management system that provides binary packages. Typing "brew install <whatever>" is a million times easier than searching out the software package's website and hunting around for a binary package that's for your OS version.
Everything the NY Times does makes it a little stranger.
Indeed, this seems like a list of reasons why software companies will come back strong.
I believe he said dearth of VC money and that it's not as big a problem as the media makes it out to be because it's much cheaper to start a company these days. High rent isn't a big problem either, because startups can work out of a tiny shared apartment and use cloud infrastructure and broadband instead of leasing expensive office space with a T1 and a server room.
The Difference Between Art and Design
I call bullshit. I've worked with some "just get it done programmers'. Have you tried to go into code that someone threw in to just make it work.

Abstraction, interfaces and unit tests are not a leisurely activity for academic developers. We use them to make the code less complex and maintain. The cost of development isn't the initial code base, its the fixes and additional features people want AFTER the initial release(s). Going back into the code and safely making changes or adding code with these in place reduces time.

I had an application without automated testing, it cost the company almost 2000 man hours to test the system every time they made a release.

Design patterns, Joel, are repeatable patterns within code. Design patterns are again to help when another developer goes into the code they can see what the heck the original developer tried to accomplish.

To summarize, I would suggest you out source some code to the far east. They will get it done really fast for you. And yes it will only work 50% of the time. I love buying products that will only work 50% of the time and unfortunately I don't get to pick which 50% works.
Masters in CS?
Is getting a Masters in CS worth it? What if you have a BS in CS? What if you have a BS in Math or Engineering?
this link sent me on a 2-hour bender. thank you.
Lots of state is lost! Like the prior values of variables.
is it really about network sound ?

95% of the desktop users needs sound to work
[a] when two streams (e.g. a video game and music) are played
[b] low latency sound in video games (a.k.a lipsync)

Another 4% wants good audio tools to work on in Linux - which there arent many of. I dunno if this is a catch-22 because of the innumerable sound SDKs.

In a previous comment I had posted described Jonathan Blow's (creator of Braid) problems with low latency sound and APIs on Linux. And this is a guy who has been using linux for over a decade now.

The thread over at his blog has been going for over a year now (http://braid-game.com/news/?p=364) and makes for interesting reading.
I've actually been there. It was a surreal feeling, one that is hard to explain in words. There was something about that place that made me feel alive, free from constraints, for some reason I could think clearer, and hunt for the answers.

There is also a really nice Arby's there.

src: http://www.reddit.com/r/geek/comments/9nbyc/on_a_recent_road...
India's Chandrayaan-1 helped discover water on moon's surface
> A 50%-good solution that people actually have solves more problems and survives longer than a 99% solution that nobody has because it’s in your lab where you’re endlessly polishing the damn thing. Shipping is a feature. A really important feature. Your product must have it.

I think this does matter.
Except if it is repetitive enough of a task for me to be inclined to automate it, in what way is it fun?

Are people really having fun in an MMO, or is it just a human sized skinner box (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operant_conditioning_chamber).

I played these games for years in an addictive behavior pattern. I think back on it and I realize that I was literally wasting my life.

So how long before MMOs are properly regulated and controlled?
More Slaves Today Than At Any Time In Human History
Just remember that this principle applies doubly if you're a startup.

And it applies doubly again if you're an early stage startup, because you're still deciding what to build at that point. Astronaut architecture is a complete waste of precious time that you don't have.
"And unit tests are not critical. If there’s no unit test the customer isn’t going to complain about that.”

By all means, ship. Do what you gotta do. But a code base that doesn't have tests cannot safely be refactored. This technical debt must eventually be paid by the product owner in cash and the code's maintainers in sanity.
Duct tape is a great metaphor. Duct tape was one of my favorite toys as a child. My dad was always mad at me for wasting it. But i can't help it if i want to build a tower from straws and duct tape, a tool thats as flexible as duct tape is empowering for a 10 year old. I propose duct tape become the new hacker symbol! :D
Or, even simpler: you can't reverse an infinite loop without some prior knowledge of when (and how) you entered it.
I don't think that's the point Joel is making. At the end of the article, it really comes together. Perhaps you are too heavily focused on the specifics (unit testing, etc) instead of the overall theme. He's basically saying that while the other guys are wasting time overengineering a project, sometimes just getting to work and getting started is a much more productive approach.

Joel isn't directly bad-mouthing unit testing or multithreading, but as developers we tend to think about all of these cool toys we can use and "ooooh" and "ahhhh" instead of actually shipping code. Try not to get so hung up on the specifics.
Part of the reason he started Mint was because he was very financially conscious. It would be silly of him to reverse course on that now.

He's a smart man. Congratulations Aaron. Good work.
You know, it is a great book and I love Jamie's interview and the "duct tape" style was used well at Netscape, but just because the guy doesn't writing unit tests or use higher-level abstractions doesn't automatically make him better than other types. Some of the smartest programmers I've met have been religious about TDD and strict formatting and commenting and as a result maintain and work on some incredibly large and complex systems.

Did those systems start out that way? Maybe not, but after a few years and a couple rewrites I'm sure they came to the same conclusion that most programmers do when they work on things for a long time: "I wish I could go back and write some tests / automate some stuff / add better debugging, etc." I know I always feel that way. I do now, after about a year and a half of hacking together our site. I'd kill for a decent test suite and fully-automated deployment. Kill!

Both styles of programming have a purpose. Maybe we'd like to avoid multi-threaded architectures, but it isn't always possible. When you have 6 weeks to launch, maybe unit tests aren't necessary, but eventually not having them will start doing more harm than good.

The more I read the writings of celebrity programmers / entrepreneurs, the more I come to realize that most of what they write reads like an attempt to justify their way of thinking as being The Right Way. Why can't we all just agree there is more than one way to skin a cat and each probably has an applicable use case or two?
Yes, thank you. The moral of the story is that you ship a product first, then you tweak, improve, and refactor it once you've got a reason to!
One of my pet peeves is articles that idolize autism like this. Most people with autism are severely developmentally delayed. Autistic savants that you often hear about in the media are extremely rare.

"As a general view, they have excellent memory and strong attention to detail. They are persistent and good at following structures and routines."

Bullshit. Anyone who actually works with autistic people would cringe at that line.

It's like making an unqualified statement "amputees are the best runners" because a small handful use those awesome prosthetics to run super fast.
Once Steve Jobs sees this it probably will be.
OK, those sound good, with the exception of 1 and 3. Higher expectations, ie wsprague doctrine. Educational parity. And holding parents more accountable for how their children are doing.

With respect to 1 and 3, changing kid's attitude is not what school is for. That's the parent's job. Further, and you are probably too young to realize this, but ALL teens have bad attitudes. White, black, or polka dot purple. I am at that unfortunate age where I am obliged to pay both elementary school and University tuition. I can tell you from experience that doing homework and getting good grades are about as important to your AVERAGE teen aged girl as Mom and Dad say they are. And certainly no MORE important.

So when you say that black teens have bad attitudes . . . to a parent this is not entirely surprising. ALL teens have bad attitudes. It is up to parents and teachers to put boots to butts and force education onto what in most cases will be unwilling students. Notice I didn't say that they needed to explain to the student why it is good to get an education. That doesn't work with white kids, and I have no reason to believe that it would work with black kids. Parents and teachers shouldn't negotiate with kids. We should direct them. As wsprague intimated, it is not about kids being satisfied or having fun, or even wanting an education.
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Chart: U.S. Federal debt as a percentage of GDP
Did I seriously get down-voted for asking a legitimate technical question? That's an abusive down-vote in my opinion, people should be able to ask technical questions without being ridiculed because they don't know the specific inner-workings of different OS kernels.
Seeing all electronic music lumped together as "Techno" makes me angry. 1310 (740 math).
"I'd kill for a decent test suite and fully-automated deployment. Kill!"

Then why don't you write one? I suspect you don't have the time - well back then when you created the system, you did not have the time either. So the bottom line again seems to be: it is not actually THAT important. Otherwise you would make the time.
How did your answer get up-voted 7 times. This confuses me; you put me down AND didn't answer my question.
The correct URL is http://beta.thehindu.com/sci-tech/article24322.ece
Agreed, if they had a real device I'm sure the video would have been shot in a different way than. This is simply an animation of what it could look like, but I highly doubt it actually exists. Otherwise why have a computer animated hand do the actions, instead of a real one.

Or is this the new strategy, let's show something that looks like a fake when actually we have it.

Any advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo.
Um, BSD is a unix, right? Did you mean to ask about porting from Linux to BSD?
I'd like to know more before signing up. But maybe that is because it is still in beta.
if we do not change policy

Move along.
"After he jumped that shark I don't read anything he writes anymore."

...how'd you get that quote then? Or did you only read enough to get something to complain about?
Yeah. Good stuff.

I once scraped the data for Starbucks in Manhattan and it was a bit of a pain: http://gawker.com/011483/gentrification-map (2003? I feel old.)
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