skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Interesting to think how these rules would work applied to other formats, like pitching a startup, or giving a scientific talk. Their applicability indicates a possible truth: people want a narrative, everywhere, all the time.
The privacy apocalypse is coming. People will stop caring, even more than they already have, and if someone can be elected* after repeatedly breaking campaign promises, then surely past behavior only matters as an excuse, rather than a reason.

* I don't have anyone specific in mind, here; politicians, all of 'em.
I worked with an extremely smart and productive programmer who only worked M-F 7-4, and never did any programming outside of work. Any company would be lucky to have him.
I enjoy my Mini 9 Hackintosh. It works really well, though I haven't been brave enough to upgrade it to Snow Leopard, yet.

I do also have to admit that I finally begin to understand why people put up with all the negatives of buying a Macintosh (cost, weight, Apple, single mouse button, limited options). It's just a much nicer OS than Windows, and in some ways nicer than Linux (though not in a few that are particularly important to me).
This is available now, in the just released gdb-7.0.
Debug any native Linux process in reverse, on x86 and
x86_64 architectures. Reverse-continue, reverse-step,
reverse-next, and so on. It's pretty fast, too!
First mover advantage applies to open source mindshare, too.

MySQL was faster and supported by PHP. MySQL stopped being faster in a relatively short time, by then MySQL already had the mind-share (and thus resource) advantage.

Exact same situation as Linux vs. BSD -- an early boost (in that case, the AT&T lawsuit) led to a long-term lead, regardless of whether that lead was otherwise warranted.
Five signs that green is the next bubble
As a developer, I take it as a red flag whenever I hear a prospective employer categorically state "I would never hire a programmer that X."

First of all, it's a heuristic. If a programmer doesn't program outside of work, it could be that they are not passionate and don't take the time to keep their skills sharp. It could also be that they are a polymath genius, and simply can't function unless their life is full of a variety of interests.

Hiring heuristics are appropriate when there are too many applicants. For the sake of efficiency, you need some way to narrow down the huge stack of applications. However, if you are having a hard time finding developers, that's not the time to use heuristics.

It tells me something about a prospective employer's problem-solving skills and imagination when they would not consider interviewing someone for a single reason, such as not having a blog. That's like being a one-issue voter.

Also, these heuristics have a way of confirming themselves. The person who hires only programmers who do X will probably end up finding decent programmers anyway, but they will be oblivious about the ones that got away.
Hi Murkin. I'm not saying it's typical, and I'm probably using a bad example here, but business owners in my experiences dealing with them fall heads over heals for purchases that will help them grow revenue. A solid product that just does that, and pitched well, will make the $25 seem like a pretty good deal for them. 7-page business research reports (e.g. from Forrester, Gartner, etc.), for instance, tend to go for a few hundred dollars, so businesses do spend on investments that give them good returns.
Unfortunately, but realistically, this is a much more complicated formula than Amdahl's law.
There was talk of rewriting it for Rails 3, but as it was pretty much vaporware at the time and I had enough of the extremely tight deadlines by that point, the decision to stop was mutual.

My comment wasn't against Apress for canceling the book, well within their right to do so. However their processes are a bit backwards and I'm sure not all authors get the same treatment, echoing peter's comment about the git/python books being available online.

Before the apress book I started an open source Merb book, after I saw how awesome the online Django book was and I would have liked beginning merb to have going the same way with peer review.
Google can divide by zero
Did you mean... an investment in airline x could keep airline x afloat, right?
Can one ever truly master software development?

I certainly hope I never stop feeling like there's a lot more to learn. Once you start feeling that way, the challenges and the pleasure in overcoming them will most certainly end, which doesn't necessarily have anything to do with how much there's really left to learn.
Internet: 1 Newspapers: 0
This is false. You must not be familiar with the way local Fox affiliates work. Local news != Fox News Channel.

Sorry if this was just a partisan joke and I missed the humor.
I understand your comment. Intuitively I agree with you but in the context of one of the original devs writing bash it would make no sense to tie the history command to the interactive REPL. Treating everything the same would lead to less bugs in "their" system while leaving a caveat for all the userland script writers.
Perhaps, but Reddit has a larger community, and the AMA is a tradition there. I would encourage as many people as possible to go over and ask a few questions. Creating an account takes all of 30 seconds.

It's not often we get to talk to a VC in anonymous setting.. It allows for far more honest answers than you'd see on Blogs, etc.
Uh,

The Google books settlement gives Google something like a monopoly on "orphaned" titles, titles that would otherwise be entirely unavailable. Whether that's justified or not is debatable.

But unless there's something I don't know, Google Groups is just one archive of usenet and anyone with enough space could create another - in fact, I seem encounter other such archives regularly in my ... Google searches.
Publishers seem to encourage long books, but I doubt you'd need to produce something so long.

This is one of the reasons why I like PeepCode they don't encourage padding to fill a page count.
FYI, Jim Simons is a math PhD who runs one of the world's most successful hedge funds, that trades mostly algorithmically and as far as I know, mostly hires CS, math, and physics grads and not so much finance.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Harris_Simons for more info.
Shooter was kind enough to tell us the doctor was IFM-affiliated, so that could be a start. (See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=868600)

Not all practitioners of functional medicine are the same, though. I would suggest also seeking a more specific recommendation for your condition.
I feel some people are focusing on the wrong thing, most likely because of my poor presentation. I'll try to answer your question, but I also want to elaborate a bit:

In relaying my story, I kind of 'cast' the diagnosing physician(1) as the hero, in part because it was such a relief to me for someone to finally listen and think logically, because it was relief to me to finally have an answer...and also because I was trying to shorten the post. But remember, by the time I saw this doctor, I had my condition narrowed down to a couple things already, and one of my guesses was correct. A search engine could have had equal billing, diagnostically. This guy didn't have a halo on his head when I found him or a neon sign saying he was "The One." He was not the first person I was told was an amazing diagnostician or "like House." He was just one in a long line of doctors, albeit one of a small number that was compassionate, open-minded and listened. I never brought up my ideas about what I had until I gave the doctors a chance to give me their ideas, because I didn't want to bias them. This doctor was just the first one that hit on the actual problem, and was willing to order confirmatory testing. It was largely odds. If you see enough doctors, it will probably happen eventually...a million typing monkeys and all that. The real heroes are the doctors who will actually treat you once your diagnosed, even at great risk to their livelihood. The real heroes are the ones that will fight the insurance companies and help you while you're going through treatment.

The final diagnosis wasn't really magical, or the act of an amazingly brilliant doctor. Yes, having the diagnosis was a psychological relief, but the most important could be this: the big, insurmountable problem for most people will not be getting a diagnosis but finding - and paying for - a treatment. There is basically a witch hunt in this country for doctors that diagnose and treat complex diseases. Complex means expensive, and insurance companies don't like that. Getting a proper diagnosis can be an enormous problem, but it is often just the start of the journey.

(1) Um, I'm getting tons of emails asking for my specific diagnosing doctor's name - which I simply can't give out. If you have any of these particular diseases, he will not treat you anyway. Remember, he turned me away. He would not even start a battle with the insurance companies. If you have something unusual or that is complex or that is outside of the insurance company parameters, he would send you elsewhere for treatment anyway.
How Does Lynda.com Have Paid Subscribers If Information Wants To Be Free?
wav2midi?

Anyone?
I'd rather get yelled at in a meeting and sent out with the VP of sales to improve my knowledge/skills/value than sit around all year waiting for the 30 minute yearly 'performance review' where my managers tell me nothing.
I saw your post below, thanks for explaining a bit more of the context.

Sorry if I came through a bit cynical and sarcastic, reading your post I thought you were pushing a more get-rich-quick philosophy. Thanks for clarifying.
Speaking as student in kung fu of 10 years and a teacher for 5, I can say this does happen, and it does work. When sparring, I had several instructors find a weakness in me, and exploit that weakness until it went way.

They never abused me, but as a hotshot 17 year old, was humbling to have my ass handed to me by an overweight, half blind 50 year old man.
Information wants to be free, even at Wal-Mart
I can’t believe they just send me this stuff for free
Elsewhere, Giles Bowkett described hiring through networking, HN, blogging, twitter, and so forth as being "inbreeding" and would produce "retarded" results.

I <3 Giles!

http://www.flickr.com/photos/raganwald/3488885664/

p.s. Giles was positively kind in comparison to discussions elsewhere. It really shows that individual communities do have a very strong cultural bias, which I think supports your point and his:

http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/9s5pd/no_i_woul...
Hmm -- my understanding is they were one of the biggest low latency trading shops. Biggest in the sense of percentage of profits generated this way. Maybe some of the changes the SEC is pushing through lead to this.

Also, he's stupidly fucking rich. Sometimes calling in rich is the right thing to do.
I've been a programmer professionally for over 10 years and worked with a variety of teams. In my experience, I haven't observed a correlation between tinkering with programming as a hobby and the ability to be an effective employee. From what I've seen, communication skills, interpersonal skills, and the ability to motivate oneself have more impact than hobby programming.

"I wouldn't take my car to a mechanic who takes his own car to the dealer." -- I see your point, but use your imagination a bit more. Perhaps there are really good mechanics out there who really love being mechanics but at the end of the day want to do something different than work on cars. In other words, you can love something and be good at it without it consuming all of your waking life.

You have to be careful with taking such a hard line. As a developer, I would hesitate to work with you.

EDIT: For the record, I work on lots of side projects outside of work.
There was this griefer mythomaniac in the Swedish groups, who sent cancels on others' messages all the time when he couldn't answer (I assume with constructed headers so it wouldn't be removed on your local server).

He also did things like send cancels on people quoting his insulting stuff long afterwards, so they wouldn't show up with his name in Google.

I had read the rfc:s, but couldn't even imagine anyone would be so unserious at the time. Ah, innocence.

I don't know if Google still remove messages when cancels show up on Usenet, but you could try...

Edit: OK, I can't complain about the downvotes; it was a joke but it is arguably immoral to remove information.
"For example, Hacker News could change its system so that nobody got a point simply for posting a comment."

You don't get a point simply for posting a comment: all points come from upvotes - downvotes. Initial "1 point" label is a purely cosmetic thing.
It's still only early evening in California.
It looks like they already fixed the search. I can find my own embarrassing posts from when I was a teenager. I had forgotten how excited I was about computer games. :P
So you want my job: Name Consultant
Google is correctly computing tan(round_double(Pi/2)) -- it evaluates each subexpression as a double-precision floating-point value.
Ask HN: How do you determine an initial valuation?
I'm getting ready to start looking for some angel funding but I'm having trouble determinig how to value my startup for their investments.

Did PG have any advice on this in any of his articles?

Those of you who have gone through this, how did you come up with your very first valuation?
Seems like an interesting field - specialised, yet creative, and demanding core business skills as well.

Just one thing - surely he put Network Solutions in there as a red herring trap for young players? Why, oh why would you name check URL availability with a provider notorious for squatting?
Booklets printing, print booklet, color booklet printing
William Kamkwamba interview
Or just wait for Google to fix it, I guess.
The Three Rules of TDD
"non-stop" means that some or all of the threads in the process may be running while gdb is prompting the user for the next command. So for instance you may have one thread stop at a breakpoint, but the rest keep running.

"Multi-inferior" means you can be debugging several different processes at once. I didn't work on this one personally so I can't say much about the benefits. But the work was paid for by a contractee, so obviously somebody thinks it is better. ;-0
I know someone who was incorrectly diagnosed as having MS but it turned out (apparently) to be Lyme disease. A couple factoids:

* Lyme tests can often give (even repeated) false negatives. The bacterium can lie dormant or hide. This is why it's a good idea to get a lyme test as a baseline if you're going to be doing a lot of outdoors stuff.

* Most doctors are not educated about Lyme disease, so if you think you might have it, it is important to find a specialist or a doctor who is "Lyme-literate".

Also, how is this not on the front page with 300 points in 17 hours? Flagged too much?
Agreed, but I think you missed the point, which is...

If the programmer sitting in front of him for an interview doesn't program outside of work hours, how did he/she get the interview in the first place? His conclusion is that they must have been goofing off at work during the day on open source forums, blogging or using twitter.
When's your Hacker News iPhone app coming out then?
I actually like newLisp - not exactly Common Lisp, but I find the implementation easy to follow. check it out on www.newlisp.org. Compiles just about anywhere and comes with a nice testing framework so you can regression test your changes, etc.
Toyota Tundra Complaints | My Complaint
Agreed. Consider software design patterns, which were inspired by the (brick-and-mortar) architect Christopher Alexander. That means that someone would have had to stop programming and learn about architecture for this cross-pollination to happen. :)
Again, all of those statements are perfectly consistent with each other. Being "little loved" is perfectly compatible with being a "worthy but unexciting product."
I would if I could, but my hands, back, and eyes can't take it.

I do a lot of technical reading instead.
How about "radioactive"? :-)

IMHO, the green movement is important and necessary, I just wish a larger fraction of them weren't fanatics and/or idiots.
I've been at a company that discouraged blogging, so this does happen.

"What's the best way to get across to a interviewer...?"

Just tell them. I wouldn't stress too much about it. If the person hiring you doesn't realize that there are tons of good programmers out there who don't blog, then you may not want to be working for them (i.e., they're newbies).
Example of traditional sales letter website (NSFW)
In praise of IBM ThinkPad warranty service
Indeed: http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?GhostOfUsenetPostingsPast
"there was no point in the book where I actively felt a desire to know what would happen next"

I agree - at the same time, after reading a couple of his other books, I feel this is the only kind of fiction that I can simply go to a book store and read for 15 min without feeling the need to finish the book (although I do finish it eventually). His style is quite haiku like in the sense that the beginning or end take a back seat. I should mention here that I am no haiku aficionado - so the reference might sound amateurish to someone who knows.
Using strace to trace mysql traffic is painful. You have to know which file descriptors to trace (check via lsof first), then trace all network traffic on those fds in verbose mode to see the queries themselves (doesn't work if the mysql protocol has compression enabled), and then try to figure out how long each of the queries took to execute by matching queries and responses.

ltraceing mysql_send_query() gives you all this information in one line.
What's Agile To You?
I see it more as: people who have problems while working with Bash will go to the Bash wiki, even if the mistake they're making could be made in other shells.
Sorry! - Downvote was iPhone fatfingered mistake.

(For a group so enthusiastic about version control with a leader who pushed for etherpad's timeline document history, this one vote then lockin feels a bit out of character)
How important is a slogan?
> My biggest concern is disposal. I don't like the idea of millions of these things ending up in landfills

Why not? You can replace 1 million regular batteries with a single one of these.

The radioactivity is not a problem, it's well enclosed in the device, and when the device is spent the radioactivity is probably close to background levels.

A landfill is the perfect place to put them and let them decay into passivity.
I didn’t have to listen to people in market research groups ramble on and on about their ATM usage or what kind of features they wanted in a mobile phone.
Why you should blog
I would say that's a result of practice, rather than enlightenment.
I assume you have some kind of neighborhood of your company's worth in mind, right?

How much do you think your company will be worth in 2 to 5 years? Do you have any data to back that up? What are the valuations of similar companies? Are you able to grow to their size? What does your overhead look like? What sort of cash flow do you foresee generating?

It's a bit of a black art, but you should be able to have some idea of what you honestly think your company should be worth. If you don't have a clue about this, then you need to wait to pursue any sort of funding until you can figure out what your value proposition is.

Remember that when you look for funding you are offering to sell a portion of your company at a discount in exchange for expertise and liquidity. That discount increases along with risk. I don't know if it's a linear relation, but the two are most definitely related.
You will definitely get a mail if you get accepted. If you get no mail, you probably didn't get accepted.

I think that is precisely wrong. The FAQ says that all applicants should expect a response, whether they were accepted or not:

Q: I applied but didn't hear from you.

A: Either our reply is caught in your spam filter, or you entered an incorrect email address in the application form.
Plus, you can trace a lot more than mysql queries.. commonly used libraries like libMagick, libxml, libcurl, libmemcached, and even internal VM functions like garbage_collect(), PyEval_SafeThread(), etc.
Pinpointing network bottlenecks
If this the only one you have read, then try slaughterhouse 5 too.
I believe the e-mails went out late the last two years. Wait until tomorrow morning to open your inbox and find out whether or not you are accepted.
It's really easy to remember though. And if you forgot you can ask your coworkers what their password is and most of the time they'll be right.
Tons of radioactive waste is put in landfills all of the time. Usually, it just has to decay down to background radiation levels before it is allowed to be dumped there. Most US landfills have radiation detectors where the trucks enter. If your industrial trash sets off the alarms, they will usually ship it back to you and make you deal with whatever is setting off their alarms. This happens , for example, to hospitals sometimes, as they generate a lot of radioactive waste from nuclear scans, etc.
"iterative and incremental projects"
that's it.
“It turns out there was a bug, a specific bug, that affected search within a specific group,” Google spokeswoman Victoria Katsarou told wired.com late Wednesday.

Based on my own Google Usenet searches this past year, this is total nonsense. How are we ever supposed to trust them to have a monopoly on indexing the world's out-of-print books (you have read the settlement terms, haven't you?) when they can't even be honest about their mistakes?
First Pictures Of Single Window Gimp
I upvoted to compensate. Good on you for explaining what happened.
"Ironically I've had the exact opposite experience. In professional life, the best I could say about any programmer who doesn't code in their spare time is that they're "ok." And more often than not, I'd call them pretty mediocre....No offense to anyone here."

Saying that you didn't intend to offend doesn't give you carte blanche to say offensive things.

I'm one of those guys who doesn't code outside of work. I have a limited capacity for that kind of intense thinking, and since I'm using that capacity at work, I have to take time away to stay sharp. It's stupid and shortsighted to conclude that this makes me mediocre, even if everyone else in your limited life sample has been mediocre.

Also, for the record? Nothing you wrote was ironic.
The answers to this are so ridiculous. "Well too bad because as it turns out when he goes home he cures cancer, with paper and pencil!"

Is it really necessary to explain that the point is that this person clearly isn't passionate about his work, as demonstrated by having zero outside interest in the subject. Clearly if he is a genius and has some amazing reason this doesn't apply.

More importantly the point of this article wasn't so much that he wouldn't be hired out of spite or something, but that he would never even get to know these people and thus get a chance to interview. This is of course obviously true and has nothing to do with "privacy" concerns. If you are an active member of the community, then you will inevitably meet other people in this field and get opportunities that just won't show up in the classifieds, there's nothing controversial about it.
Maybe because the programmer is an adult and isn't wowed by the prospect of spending more than 5 minutes writing something (s)he can buy for $20?

Also, this is seriously nasty ageism. Once you grow up the same thing will happen to you: significant others, friends, activities, hobbies, pets, kids, etc, most of which don't involve sitting on your ass in front of a computer. In fact, having put 10 years into this industry, I work a lot harder and better at my actual job if I don't spend all my off hours in front of a computer.
Perhaps he understands that humans are not purely rational beings, that to make a point stick you need more than just facts.