skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thank you, that was most interesting. I knew about the myelination (sp?), but did not realize that that affected the speed of transmission so much.

Very interesting about the secondary system still being active, maybe that is what allows us to measure the distance of a stimulus to the brain by using the difference between the arrival times of the pulses ?

Are you working in this field ?
Did you mean that my summary is concise and correct, or just a correct representation of an incorrect statement?
That's actually what I imply above. Given that we pay $800/month for rack space, power and bandwidth, and would do so regardless of our development stack, the extra $100/mo for the luxury of developing in C# is just noise.
The Problem with Open Source is it’s Open Source
Isn't it the same thing as lifting the body of oneself up in the air for 1 minute? Human being can't do it without outside help.
The big problem in 1984 is that observation is only one way. But, if everyone can watch everyone, then I don't think it's a problem. This pretty much exists today in small towns and villages.
It's all subjective. Naturally, I've done my share of development across a wide range of frameworks and languages, and I've made my choice. The best advice I can give would be to do so as well.

Personally, I consider it a slight competitive advantage that so many shops avoid Microsoft stuff on ideological grounds. If they never try it, they'll never know. And we'll have that slight edge in getting things to market faster.
It is not only the pricing but the availability. I think, here (Philippines), people buy pirated DVDs because the distribution is so wide-spread. So if you sell cheap and legit copies and people have to go all the way out to buy, then chances are that they won't.

With Redbox on the other hand, if it is available just around the corner or at least in places with security guards (less likely to be vandalized, etc.), then I'm pretty sure that the ones who sell illegal copies will go out of business in weeks.
Number of bugs definitely not, especially if he's maintaining a large or well-established code base. It is common for someone to be bogged down with problems rooted in someone else's past design. Also, if you're going to give bug reports any weight, you have to read them fully; a single bug report could point to incredible incompetence, while another developer's 20 bugs combined could all be really minor issues.

Code reviews might be more applicable. But, like bug reports, the code being reviewed could be as much the fault of past developers as the person trying to make changes. There is also a tendency for peers to focus on minor issues like coding style, so make sure your reviews are covering real problems before you attach too much weight to the results.

Having said that, this is what I would do:

First, judge a programmer based only on the experience he claims to have. It's just not fair to dump a new programmer onto a team and expect brilliance; if his team is relatively brilliant, he will always appear incompetent. You should, however, expect improvements over time (such as, less time required to fix things, or more instances where he speaks up with new ideas).

Next, judge a programmer based on individual work. Every programmer should have some task, even a small task, that is only theirs, even if the majority of the work requires teams. This makes it easier to judge how the programmer tackles problems, how code looks, etc. This also avoids the pitfalls above, as there are no excuses. Also, some programmers work best alone; you should be seeing their best work, and if that is shoddy, you should get rid of them.

Only after considering the above, should you look at team work on large code bases.
Yeah, myelination really is a huge improvement. According to Wikipedia [1], the fast pain fibres I mentioned (A-delta) have a conduction speed of 3-30 m/s, and the slow fibres (C) have a speed of 0.5-2.0 m/s. As you can see on that page, there are much faster fibres than those.

For some definition of "field", I suppose I do :) I did a minor in cognitive neuropsychology in university, and now I'm doing an internship for a computational neuroscience project.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axon#Types

(Edit: I don't know why we still have slow "C" fibres. I suppose there's no pressure to get rid of them, so they've just stuck around all this time. It probably helps with learning, because it persists for a longer time, whereas the fast signal is more for the immediate reaction... just a guess.)
--->" In a recession, human resources are cheaper as more skilled people come on to the market. Costs, such as office space and PCs, are lower."

Right, but this also means that it will be harder to get funding and customers are less willing to pay for your service.

--->"Business plans start to focus on clear revenue models, not crazy ideas."

Wake up! You business people. You can't PLAN a great start up from the beginning. Google didn't have a "clear revenue model" for 4 years. "Crazy ideas" are exactly what we need. If a start up idea doesn't sound crazy to you,i (and others) would have done it already.
Slightly related, except not -- I use HN on an Android device, and while I don't particularly mind the layout, I can't seem to login. I can enter my username/password, but it doesn't go anywhere. If I use a wrong password, I get an error message.

Anyone know what's wrong?
This guy is amazing. He also was the official artist for the Star Trek: Voyager books.
See Douglas Crockford's suggestion for HTML5 at http://www.crockford.com/html/
SakinFan Web TV
Read Cool Tools, but not this. The whole blog is this kind of thing.
Tribal fusion is good if you have a lot of page views but few clicks(they just do CPM ads, but are pretty much top dog in the space, so they can get better rates), but you need a lot of traffic to get in.

You need about 5K uniques per day to get in, although that number varies by category...for example I hear that if you have a game website, you'll need 20K uniques per day to get in.

I just needed CPM since I get a lot of page views per user, average is only ~6 pages, but that number is distorted by all the one page wonders from when the site hits some social network. The actual users who come to the site from niche specific sources, do about 20 pages per hit.
Robert Spinrad, a Pioneer in Computing, Dies at 77
I agree with him completely when he writes: "The act of merely copying a photograph has no artistic merit except to hone one's artistic skills."

However, when he writes: "This painting of Tica is not just a copy of a photograph, but is a product of many artistic decisions, whereas I deviated from the reference photo for more aesthetic appeal" I have to say, "not so much".
Except that as a student you get most everything on the MS Stack for free.

Enjoy your straw man.
Lots of pageviews/uniques is not my problem, getting enough people to click the ads is. Adsense scores horrible on one site we run because of that.

I will definitely sign up and let you know how it worked out.
There's only one metric that counts: (perceived) value delivered to the customer. Everything else is just a proxy.
Word to the wise. Discount the old guys at your own peril.

Discount anyone at your own peril. These days, things are often not as they appear.
First off, I'm not a Microsoft salesman, so please take anything I tell you as the experiences of one person, and weigh it against your own.

That being said, one box on the MS stack can handle a lot of capacity. Enough that I'm constantly amazed to see other people's startups folding under the load of, say, a single slashdot article or a few thousand people kicking the tires at once.

The box that Twiddla lives on has seen some pretty heavy days, and it's never had its CPU over 5% in anger. Considering the number of paying users we'll need before we need to add a second one, well, I'd be delighted to pay another $2k out of that stack of money!
Offline mode. My SCM works in a train tunnel, but my bug tracker doesn't. Total pain in the backside.
cross-posted from the comments there:

the problem here is the fact that whatever you pass to friendfeed is again executed in the context of your page.

This means that the alert() you so "cleverly" injected runs in the context of the CALLERs page, so the document.cookies that are alerted are the cookies on the source page (the page where the friendfeed-page is sourced on), not of the target page (friendfeed).

This also means that friendfeed doesn't have to do sanitization because whatever you are "injecting" there you could as well just put on your page to begin with.

The real problem behind JSONP is that the consumer has to trust the provider and there is no way to do ANY sanitization of that (the moment you add that "script src=" you are toast and you need to do that because requesting the script via XHR for example isn't possible due to the same origin policy).

So while this might look like a nice idea, it's completely unneeded and doesn't solve the real problem, which is, unfortunately, insolvable in pure JavaScript. You can of course proxy the connection, but not having to do that is what JSONP was invented for.
Why the Greatest Advertiser of All Time Would Have Embraced Piracy
You realize that you can use the same copy of Visual Studio twice, right?

As in "Today I'm going to write this new web app, as soon as I install Eclipse, Django and SVN" would sound just as silly. It's just development tools.

Oh, and for what it's worth, Microsoft will give you 15 seats worth of MSDN Universal for $400 if you tell them you're a small business. Per seat, the MS tools are the cheapest part of setting up a new dev box for me. (CodeSmith, ReSharper and Ants Profiler are the ones that hurt!)
I last used Oracle circa 2002. The experience of using the SQL workbench tools, and installing a new server was far worse, just awful compared to the SQL Server equivalent.
Asus Making World's Cheapest Digital Reader
Just because something is open source doesn't mean we can't have a rational conversation about whether it's well-designed.
One is a prerequisite for the other.
Hey guys, here is the raw data for the study in case anyone is interested: http://www.wingify.com/case-studies/prediction-resources/pre...
True, but its not fair to have make irrational statements that open source is crap either...
I agree! This is on the roadmap.
my housemate's first python script was to help with documenting processes such as this one. when he runs the script it takes a screenshot and then provides a text box for him to comment in. it basically added version control to his mechanical engineering design process. he wanted to document why he was making certain design changes as he went. i imagine it work for this process, too.
Neighbors construction company
Kansas City General Contractor Neighbors Construction specialize in Multi-Family Projects, Senior Living Projects, Hospitality Projects and lots more. Premier commercial builder in Kansas City.
100% Adsense: $1.50 Adsense revenue from 10,000 unique visitors so far.
What I want is not another one, there are plenty of them already.
Sure, but that is no reason to lump all open source software together either.

Some 'closed source' software is total crap too, but there we say 'product x sucks'. Here the fact that something is open source is taken to imply that all open source is dangerous simply because it is open.

It's a veiled way to promote security by obscurity. If you can't see the leaks we'll all pretend they don't exist.

Anyway, you're the last person on the planet I should argue that with :)
That's actually similar to what I was thinking. Making HTML5 support generic tags and attributes that could be defined as first-class elements would completely eliminate the need to create a huge pile of new tags. This would allow for much more innovation while not limiting the design to some arbitrary set of new elements. Instead of thinking of HTML as a "document format", it should be thought of as a display interface with a low-level protocol for interaction.
Since his only examples are wordpress and phpbb wouldn't it be more accurate to say that php sucks? Or that programmers who code in php tend to do a poor job?
Facebook Mobile Getting Ready for Expansion
Or simply that wordpress and phpbb suck. That would seem to be the only valid conclusion from that sample.

There are plenty of other examples of software in all kinds of languages out there that have had security holes, plenty of them were closed source too.
Saw this a couple of weeks back. 9 other paintings by 9 other folks that look like photos:

http://www.thetoyzone.com/2009/blog/10-awesome-images-that-a...
LG GW300 Viewty Unlocked 
It appears that LG is going to push out a new LG Viewty mobile phone quite soon and is called the LG Viewty GW300 and although LG hasn’t even announced this new Viewty it is apparently already available in French telecom stores reports gsmhelpdesk.Spec wise the LG Viewty GW900 offers a QVGA display, full QWERTY keypad, Bluetooth, 10MB memory, MicroSD expansion, and a 2 megapixel camera.
Are the people upvoting this also selling directly to end users? Or just upvoting to agree that it is a good revenue model :/
adsense: 90%+
This doesn't sound like the right argument to me.

There are lots of link spammers out there. Their goal is to make garbage sites seem more "important" to search engines by increasing the number of unique sites that link to them. WordPress is targeted because it is a popular enabler of web sites, that can essentially be used to make hundreds of unique sites do your bidding.

I have seen similar problems with any pervasive site technology. For instance, I've seen public wiki pages vandalized ("talk" pages with hundreds of lines of links to garbage sites, presumably to make Google find them more relevant). And I've seen problems with PHPBB forums (new "accounts" with profile links to "home pages" that are really just more spam for Google to find). These things don't happen because someone goes to one site, they happen because robots target the popular technologies and try to automatically find sites on the web that are exploitable.

You see this with closed-source pervasive technologies (like Windows). It's pretty clear that seeing source code is not necessary to repeatedly perform devastating hacks.

In all cases, the correct solution is vigilant and competent administration. Of course if you never change the defaults, you're more vulnerable. Of course if you don't patch your server regularly (these tools are constantly improved), you're open to old hacks. And ultimately, if you choose the popular tool, you can expect more frequent issues.
maybe you have cookies off
I re-wrote some HTML templates for news.arc about a week ago, so that it uses XHTML + CSS. I also put in an iphone-specific CSS and Javascript library so it seamlessly has iphone capabilities built into it.

I haven't gotten it switched over to arc yet though. I'm planning to sit down one night soon and re-write all of the HTML-generating code. If there is a Lisp/Scheme/Arc hacker that wants to work with me on it, we could probably work it all out in an evening or two. My email is in my profile if you're interested.
Ubiquitous recording. Capturing damn near everything on video, and storing it in some endless cloud.

Not quite there yet, but headed that way.
Email driven everything ala posterous.
I have a vague memory in a cobwebbed corner of my mind that the old NeXT system software had a gamma value of 1. I couldn't find a citation for that, but if I don't have a misfiring neuron this would be the 2nd time that this software has gone through a change in gamma.

Edit: Here is a paragraph that, at least, supports where I got this memory from:

Taken from http://www.bberger.net/rwb/gamma.html

"Some display systems such as NeXT's and SGI's contain hardware lookup tables that correct for monitor gamma. On these systems the frame buffer values provided by the application are corrected for the gamma of the CRT by a lookup table in the display controller, producing a display system gamma of 1.0 which linearly maps frame buffer values into intensity."
You have to keep in mind the audience Techcrunch is appealing to: a lot of these rockstars probably really think wisdom comes with intelligence instead of the years.

What I'm wondering about, though, is the rest of these younger entrepreneurs: I understand that the older entrepreneurs of course make better decisions, but I wonder how much of these younger entrepreneurs (wrongfully) think they are just as capable, and thus something like Dunning-Kruger was taking effect.

I try to reflect this on myself, 26 years old and founder of a startup, and I am fully aware of my inexperience. I personally attempt to compensate that problem by gathering more experienced people around me, but in the end, there is only so much you can do about it. I do think, however, that knowing you don't know everything at least allows you to be more aware when you're likely to make a mistake.
Ours breaks down something like this:

One-time fees: 30%
Subscriptions: 60%
Transaction fees: 8%
Service/consulting: 2%
Thanks, I was puzzling over whether I was missing something, since the callback itself can run arbitrary code.

I actually use this technique with BOSS to store the original search query parameters since they're not always possible to recover from the results object, eg:

var callback = 'YBOSS.setLastQuery(\''+quotedQuery+'\');YBOSS.retrieved';
Isn't that what Andy Warhol used to do?
Both: I am licensing to companies myself, and yeah, it's also a damn good revenue model.
The main thrust of the presentation is to lower the bar in people's minds to writing test code.

Giving people 'permission' to write sloppy test code makes them more likely to write it.

In the context of selling people on writing tests, it is defensible advice.

For people who have a lot of tests, then yes, raising the standard for your test code might make sense.
This is a well put argument and I won't attempt to go into all of your points more than to say that I pretty much agree, and step back some from my argument that formal analysis necessarily helps abstraction.

I guess my point was that in order to for larger and larger abstractions to be implemented, there needs to be trust in those abstractions. One problem that you point out is that right abstractions can be difficult to come up with, which will not be improved by formal analysis. The other problem is that as you build greater and greater abstractions on top of each other, "holes" in those abstractions can cause odd problems in the system. Here, formal verification can at least provide the level of trust that the abstraction works exactly how you expect it to and can implement your system on top of it without concern for odd effects.

One analogy could be with the computer hardware on which software is implemented upon. It goes without saying that while software is often expected to have flaws, the hardware is essentially assumed to be flawless for all intensive purposes. This isn't a perfect analogy because you have firmware, etc, but hopefully it illustrates my point. You don't worry about the processor not correctly implementing

add ax, bx

It is taken as a given. At almost no point in software development today can you make that assumption about any code.

Maybe formal analysis isn't the solution to this particular problem. I do think it is important to research the topic as fully as we can to figure out if it is or isn't.
So?

At the very least they amount to people doing due dilligence and making the best choice they can.

Now you can argue all those people don't really know what they're doing, and you sit in a position of actually knowing they're making a mistake, but that's all so much posturing now, isn't it?

The point is, I'm providing stats, facts, information. It's great to be able to argue their relevance, because it's great to have something more than an unfounded opinion to base a discussion on.

Which is my point.
A generated auto-login link where clients can easily fill in bugs.
Thank you. That was the impression I got. I'm still curious to hear if anyone else had a different experience.

I'm not so much looking for what it takes to get code running optimally, as much as having idiomatic code run with "reasonable" performance.
What's the url of your site?
Nevisandegan نویسندگان
I have a theory why successful 'old' guys come as such a surprise. It is because a 'young founder' is largely a product of propaganda. Young guys are mercilessly exploited by VC crowd. Venture Capitalists and startup-buying companies like Google (should I also add incubators like YC?) need to maintain 'young is good' thesis to attract the supply of fresh cannon fodder.

The truth is that a VC sits on a portfolio of undervalued options. A success among pool of startups is always a non-linear event. It is a meteoric rise, a market-share grab which often actually creates a completely new market. A very few successful startups will make a large pool of dog investments still a very profitable business. One option will fire, the rest will expire worthless.

That's why a VC has to drive all of his startups towards increasing risk and trying to grow big, fast. Go for a large team. Invest, borrow, rise capital. One of you will win, the rist... what do I care?

Now, from the point of view of entrepreneurs, they often get a very poor deal. An engineer has only one option in his portfolio -- that is his venture. Its success is largely dependent on random factors like stumbling on a network effect, or tapping a new undiscovered need of millions. What would be a true price of such an option?

Whatever the price, young guys have poor bargaining power at the negotiating table facing seasoned VCs. Older guys do better. For a young guy a startup is not only a way to riches -- it is also a way to self-actualise, to define one's identify. An old guy does not need this crap. He has accomplishment behind his belt. He can drive a hard bargain and to get better deal from a VC. He is driven to get a good business deal, and will not go dancing across the room just because his name features in some crappy termsheet.

An old hand is also more likely to take less risk and to shoot for a long term, VC appetite be damned. They will be practicing more 37signals-like approach. Profitable? Have positive cashflow? Great! And fuck your IPO plans, at least until I feel the time is right.

So, it is no wonder that older founders have better success rates. They exploit the VC industry when they want to, not the other way around.
There's an open-source Reddit client out there, if yc provided some kind of API (you don't want to do page scraping on the iphone) it would probably be pretty easy to adapt it.
Skip that useless "article" and go straight to the source:

Python 3.0 whatsnew http://docs.python.org/3.1/whatsnew/3.0.html

Python 3.1 whatsnew http://docs.python.org/3.1/whatsnew/3.1.html

They're clearer, more readable, more complete and linkable. No reason to use TFA.
Does anyone else think "disclosing" this would just boost sales of the book more than any effect on how people read the article?
"True division—for example, 1/2 returns .5."

This wasn't there previously? Ugh.
I have always used and been a fan of 2.2. It makes sense to use what most others use, imo. When you choose colours for a site you know that most people will see similar colours.

With a gamma of 1.8 I found that on other machines using 2.2, light colours I chose tended to look white and dark colours looked black.