skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I must just be missing it, but does yours implement mailing lists, issue tracker, a scriptable release process, and have the entire project history including lists and issues easily accessible as downloadable snapshots?

If not, then it seems to be more an example of what he's railing against rather than a trivial solution to his perceived problem.
What's wrong with doing something easy and fun that gets lots of media attention?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qJhiY3oQRIk

Some more info. Their website is rather low on content so you will have to sit through such a video if you want to know more.
I agree absolutely with him and I disagree with raganwald. Why is this?

Because there are only so many rockstars you can have in one joint. There are only so many people who live and breath code you can have in one room before trouble starts brewing.

Every team needs a crop of solid, dependable and slow developers that do the boring tasks. The guy who does not mind going over all the functions and commenting them. The guy who is satisfied to port a C script to Mac OS X, even though it is mindless bug testing.

And those type of guys don't code at home. If you will never hire such people, then who will do the boring tasks? Your highly intelligent and highly paid coders? You recruit them to put them for 3 months working on some inane and boring database program?

Intellectual diversity is a neccessity in any shop that makes its living from brainwork.
Can we remove "Ted Dziuba" from the title? It's in the URL right after, anyway.

Coming from a random unknown blogger, I doubt this would've made it to the front page.

I actually happen to mostly agree with what he says in this post (even though a lot of it is strawman), but really - who cares?
Sony Launch Their First Touchscreen PC: VAIO L which has Windows 7 Multi-Touch
What a snotty, immature response. Dziuba worked for Google before Pressflip, and is now working on Milo, which looks pretty sweet.

But I don't blame you for needing to snark at other people after seeing adamhowell.org.
spelling watchdog says: 'lose' not 'loose'
Wisdom and experience is the function of age if and only if you got a nice feedback mechanism to drive you in the correct direction.

Even so, a strong curiosty is required to exploit any unorthodox opportunities to increase not only your wisdom, experience, but also knowledge as well.

Entrepeneurship at an early age is an excellent way to increase wisdom.
If stairs everywhere were pianos, people would go back to using the escalator within days...
Yeah, but there's only so much one can take of Ted Dziuba's writing before the urge to respond in kind wells up.

It'd just be simpler if people wouldn't upvote his articles.
Does capitalism make people nicer?
In a capitalistic society without much of a safety net, one would think that it becomes even more important for people to make as many friends as possible -- thus creating their own safety net.

Is it generally the case that people from more capitalistic societies are nicer? Or perhaps they are nicer but only to people that might help them out in the future?
That's uncomfortably in the realm of PR bullshit for me. Give the answer, and don't spin it. The sorts of jobs you can only get through spin are jobs you don't want to have.
Didn't we lose a lot of ships though? If we thought they might do something like bomb pearl harbor, wouldn't we have spread out our ships, or kept the oldest ones at the harbor?

It seems like a bad strategy to sacrifice a significant amount of useful military assets in a false flag..ish operation.
In the States, Verizon and Comcast have stopped including Usenet because of kiddie porn concerns (or it might have been an excuse), that's probably 70% of why it's moribund.
Stopping SQL injections is obvious, but a lot fewer people remember to stop CSRF attacks, which can be solved pretty simply with one-time use tokens on forms.
Ted's an asshole, and most of the time I'm pissed off by his writing. When Uncov came "back" early last year it was terrible. That said, this article I agreed with entirely, all respect to raganwald, and it pisses me off that people would stoop to namecalling rather than discussing it. I think this is the rare Dziuba piece worth a good debate.

Above all, I can't stand insulting somebody by insulting the work they've done. Ted is obviously smart, he put a lot of work into Pressflip before retiring to have a kid, and Pressflip, while not brilliant, wasn't terrible when I used it. I just didn't see the point to it. Now he's off working on new things, so he's not exactly lazy or coasting.
It seems to me that "boring" often means "potentially automatable".
After reading this and its complacent I've-learned-as-much-as-I-need-and-besides-I-have-kids attitude, I'd say he does a good job making a case against himself being a very good programmer. His mechanical analogy (socket wrenches) for "computer code" (sic) is particularly revealing.

Ironically, none of this has intrinsically to do with his not liking to program on Saturdays, yet ends up reinforcing the notion that, for whatever reason, there is a correlation.

I know at least five guys who have small children and hack in their spare time. Yes, it's a struggle, but they all do it. I also know quite a few with small children who never do that. They never did before they had kids, either, but the kids furnish a nice excuse. Kids are handy that way. (Edit: notice how the author plays this card, even though he already said he almost never programmed outside of work or class.) Anyway, my point is that the first group are really good programmers and the second are, by and large, not. Anecodotal though this may be, I buy the idea of a correlation.

P.S. Another trait that good programmers tend to have is not seeing themselves as good enough and not getting defensive about proving how good they are. Exercise to the reader.
"Oh, Twitter - is there anything you can't do?"
I would hire someone who didn't code in their spare time, but I definitely wouldn't hire Teddy boy. Who would want that kind of publicity-addicted blowhard polluting their team?
"""Every team needs a crop of solid, dependable and slow developers that do the boring tasks."""

Well put. And this is exactly the role for which I would hire Ted if his interview gave me the same impression of him as that blog entry.
a) Different functionality.
b) Yammer is an enterprise.
I don't know why I automatically interpreted "well-established workflow" to mean password management software. It must have been the juxtaposition of that sentence with "My favorite tool is 1Password for the Mac. Anyway, point taken.
I just moved to NYC as well. I would love to keep posted about all the HN happenings. Emailing you now.
That's why many of us skip the paying good money part. They assume we're all criminals, so why not be? Everyone gets what they want that way.
This isn't a response to Raganwald. It's a response to this Reddit thread:

http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/9s3ww/would_you...
Yes, it isn't an `instrument', it's a human-computer-interface for musical purposes, as you say.

One of the great advantages of computer music is the complete decoupling of sound generation from any particular human means of controlling it. Unfortunately, because they can be manufactured so cheaply, keyboards (in the piano or organ sense) dominate as a real-time control device. (A lot of them don't even have channel aftertouch, never mind polyphonic aftertouch!)

Not that there has been a shortage of activity in this area: there's a conference http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Interfaces_for_Musical_Expr... and many niche companies making niche products, but nothing has ever really taken off.
Agreed. It takes a bit for new sites to have enough users with sufficient reputation to get things going.

The good news is that it does seem to keep a lot of the spammers out because building up a reputation takes too much energy.
A simple rule of thumb is: nested repetitions may take 'forever' to fail.

If you've got Java applet support in your browser, here's an animated example...

http://regex.powertoy.org/?pat=m/((a{0,5}){0,5})*[e]/g&a...

...based on the "WARNING: Particularly complicated..." example in the Perlre docs:

http://perldoc.perl.org/perlre.html

You can see that Django's problematic domain-validation regexes were similar to the perlre example, but even worse -- a one-or-more of unbounded length, inside a 0-or-more of unbounded length, inside a 1-or-more of unbounded length:

http://code.djangoproject.com/changeset/11603#file0
I worked with Ted at Google. Trust me, even though his articles have a certain sarcastic tone to them, he was definitely enjoyable to work with and clearly did like solving hard problems in development.

His point in this post is that you can do a great job at work but then enjoy your life outside of work.
As I recall, the aircraft carriers were not at port that day, and were repurposed as capital ships after the battleships were destroyed.

Wikipedia has a long article on foreknowledge here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pearl_Harbor_advance-knowledge_...
It seemed more productive to smash my hands with a hammer than to Twitter. But I like the connections (and conversation) I'm making.

When I tried using it for news, I got bogged into the day to day hysteria.
Apparently it takes 4 times for me to see anything, then ;)
I am not sure I agree. The main reason is that when all you do is work, you are only exposed to one codebase, written by one small group of (perhaps inexperienced) people. You are never going to get any new ideas from that; you are going to spend your 8-hour day reinventing the wheel and doing things wrong. You will just continue the same monoculture forever. This may "meet the business needs" (the favorite excuse of the non-programmer], but it's not going to be good code.

(You could be taking an interest in outside programming "stuff" at work, perhaps, but between meetings, lunch, and getting your actual work done, how much time do you have to learn new programming languages and peruse open-source projects? Probably not enough. This stuff is time-consuming!)

So anyway, you can probably be a good programmer by not being interested in programming outside of work... but you probably won't be a great one. How many great authors claim they don't read books outside of their 9-5 workday? How many great artists would rather spend time with their kids than painting?

Not many.
Best article on Entrepreneurship I've read
If it's been posted before, I apologize. Still, worth reading again.
I suspect he does enjoy development. Just doesn't want to do it all day, every day.

He writes in terms of 'enjoying solving hard problems'. If we can assume that's his motivation then 1) as long as his work includes hard problems he'll probably enjoy it and 2) being only allowed to work on the hard problems contained in the field of computing would be counter-productive.
Someone call Rob Hubbard! Sounds like a Commodore 64 tune.

But seriously, it's really cool, and I hope it sells well.
Any insults that Ted Dziuba receives are well-deserved.

He's written dozens of trollish articles on how useless other startups are or how he hopes they'll fail. It seems fair to me that people are insulting his failure to produce a successful startup when he's spent so long being a hypocrite. You can't expect to be the Glenn Beck of startups and not be on the receiving end of the trolling.

Here are some of his headlines from Uncov, incase you've forgotten his work:

"Fanboy Driven Development with Arc"
"Paul Graham, Just Shut Your Face Already"
"RockYou Dominates The Fake Business World"
"Surprise, Mahalo Still Blows"
"Mahalo Is Hawaiian for Useless"
"Guy Kawasaki Should Stick To Contentless Blog Posts"
"Web 2.0: So easy a 14 year old can do it"
"Middio: Another Marginally Useful Feature As A Product"
"WriteWith: Everybody Point and Laugh"
"YouOS: YouHave To Be Kidding Me"
"Wellsphere's Fail Tale, Part 2"
"Firefox Fanboys: The Only People More Dangerous and Less Competent Than ..."
"Did Enron Cause Web 2.0?"
"Web 2.0 Amateur Hour: Sputtr"
"VoSnap: An Overnight Delivery Of Fail"

http://www.reddit.com/domain/uncov.com
Open source to boot!

http://openbluedragon.org/
hehe. reasons to develop YOUR_LANGUAGE-lint?
Really? I'm getting kind of tired of the tool analogies. They are thrown around as answers in place of actual thinking and reasoned arguments. The comparison between learning how to use a torque wrench and learning a language is absurd.
Sorry but I hate the photo on that site!

Yeah it's nature and all but it speaks loudly about the author of that blog!
I actually liked all of those articles, except the Paul Graham one, which was part of later Uncov. Back in the day, Ted had the knack for saying exactly what needed to be said about a lot of ego-laden fellows. He's more a critic than he is a builder; I'm one of those weird fellows that thinks a critic is a valuable part of any ecology.

I'm fine with negativity as long as you're saying something useful. The OP just snarked without any meaningful criticism; I attempted to criticize him and got downvoted to the depths of Hades, which I guess is how it goes sometime. For all his numerous failings, I still like Dziuba more than I dislike him, especially when he insults somebody along with a well-delivered counterpoint rather than just insulting.
Your reader vitriolic isn't really grasping the particular distinction between "wealth" and "money" you're trying to make.

You really would want a three-way split between wealth and money and value; it's often the case that wealth production leads to value-destruction, which keeps things interesting.

It's also the case that once you have the three way wealth/value/money dynamic going you have to figure out:

- what are other people's states of mind in this classification? or, at least, what can they be?

Because, for example, in some sense fame is a kind of wealth -- it's useful if it's the right kind -- as is demand for your particular goods (or disdain for your competitor's wares), as it's also useful.

On the other hand it's not clear that it fits your description of wealth.

If it is wealth then advertisers and other persuaders count as wealth-producers.

If it isn't either you need a fourth category or you need to shoehorn it into some more-abstract notion of value.

Sidenote: I've always thought it extremely unfortunate that English uses the phrase "make money", as unless you're actually "making money" what you're doing is "getting money" (which phrase is, incidentally, apparently the vernacular amongst the unschooled dwellers of the inner city); first, rectify all the names.

This kind of sloppiness in language leads to worse derangements, as evidenced in Vitriolic's notion of creating wealth (what he's talking about is accumulating surplus wealth).
So they can get a post and link from techcrunch
I wouldn't hire somebody who publishes a picture named "obama-winning-the-nobel-proves-that-white-guilt-is-one-of-the-most-awesome-powers-on-earth.jpg" on his blog (although I'm open to interpretations of that filename).
Cormac McCarthy famously said he didn't read Proust or Pound, because to him that wasn't literature, and it wasn't what he wanted to write. There are lots of artists who famously didn't do much work, because they preferred only to work when they were inspired.

The moral is that it's possible both to be good and hardworking and good and not quite so obsessed.
Thanks for the TED link. I agree with the statement that Dan states in the video about results oriented work spaces. I would like (more) to work for a company that offers this as part of the corporate culture. I think it can only work in the context of managers that can actually set realistic goals though which seems to be tough in software development.
I'd be up for a trip to check it out in January.

Anyone interested in doing a two week trip?
Ask HN: How does Gemcutter support itself?
http://gemcutter.org/

Gemcutter seems to have displaced Github as the gem host of choice these days. That's not a plug - I have no dog in this fight.

But I am wondering how reliable they will be over the long term since I don't see much evidence of a business plan. They prominently display the Heroku and ThoughtBot logos on the main page.

But there must be more to their business model than simple sponsorship?

Or it simply not very expensive to host all of the world's gems?
I really think that it should not matter so much with this idea that there are similar existing startups. Since most of the time the actual product changes anyway, it is important that you have a good direction. I would be interested to see how many users Drop.io and Yammer have. That could actually be a validation that you have users that desire what you want to build.
Optimizing Your Facebook Application
Calling FQL With The Facebook
a. Advantages Of FQL Over The Facebook API Methods
b. Making An FQL Statement
c. Differences Between SQL and FQL
i don't know. in college i wrote static and dynamic program analyzers, and was in a very pro-java-typing group. when i moved to python i was sure the lack of typing would be problematic.

the lack of static typing has NEVER caused a bug. a few times i will have a bug because i mispell a variable name, thereby inadvertantly creating a new variable, but i have always found those problems on the next run of the program.

vastly more useful are creating tests and using them often.

to be fair to my college days, i still create object models (ish...i have my own version) and other diagrams, which i find crucial for design and frequent reference aftewards.

the whole "type" thing must be important for other problem domains.
CSS in Easy Steps
So you think not doing coding at home puts you in the "let's assign all the boring tasks to this guy" career development track?

Seriously?
PR talent is important.
Hey, I take offense to that! I agree that Chile isn't exactly a tech hub, but don't generalize.

Hackers and great programmers do exist here. It may just be harder to find them. Ironically, a place like hacker news helps with that ;)
Oh hey. Yea, I have a pair of HD280's that I wear around, and the plug is extremely nice, with a really well-thought-out adapter, and it really pissed me off with the 1st gen iPhone (http://images.techtree.com/ttimages/story/89158_002.jpg). but it's Ok. I didn't know they fixed it on gen 2, that's good.
The Short Unruly Life of Ramparts Magazine
You should have read further...there are also easy to get visas for tech workers.
Obviously if you're running off of any SVN other than the 1.1 tag, yes.
HenrySchein, a 5B tech healthcare co., has no love for Ubuntu/Firefox
Here's the page I'm directed to:

http://www.henryschein.com/us-en/BrowserUpgrade.aspx
I think another take-home point is that you cant build a business model around too many outside partnerships (what the author calls leverage). Your business has to be solid enough to gain that initial traction then the outside partners will come.
This post gave me a chuckle.

You know what's more awesome than spending my Saturday afternoon learning Haskell by hacking away at a few Project Euler problems? Fuck, ANYTHING.

Sorry, why is this guy trying to convince everyone that his hobby is better than everyone else's?
Fences - it's a Windows desktop tool that I installed about a week ago and it's made my desktop much better. Right now it is free - Nov 1, I think, it goes to pay but I don't know how much.

http://www.stardock.com/products/fences/
Every time I learn something about Emacs or incorporate someone's nifty elisp code, it pays off and keeps paying.

Latest:

; CSS color values colored by themselves
; http://xahlee.org/emacs/emacs_html.html

(defvar hexcolour-keywords
'(("#[abcdef[:digit:]]\\{6\\}"
(0 (put-text-property
(match-beginning 0)
(match-end 0)
'face (list :background
(match-string-no-properties 0)))))))

(defun hexcolour-add-to-font-lock ()
(font-lock-add-keywords nil hexcolour-keywords))

(add-hook 'css-mode-hook 'hexcolour-add-to-font-lock)
Chile and Brazil have been on my radar for a little over 11 months now. Brazil definitely seems to have the most exciting long term potential, with it's large oil reserves and it's willingness to actually exploit them, it should do very well as inflation kicks in from western government money printing. I have not crossed Brazil off my list by any means.

However, Chile just seems to fit me better. I already have a little Spanish, but no Portuguese. More importantly, though, I'm a mountain guy, not a jungle guy. The scenery in Chile is comforting to a Rocky Mountain native.

Now ... I just have to convince the wife!
>Isn't that what Command+Tab does?

No, it switches between applications, not windows, which you would know if you'd ever actually used OS X. Why are you complaining about an OS which you've never even used?
BIRT Vs Jasper Report A Comparitive Study
What he is really arguing for is more redundancy in programming. Strong typing (he really means static typing), so you can type (with your fingers) thing more than once and you can put constraint enforcing wrappers around your values. Assertions an method contracts, TDD and unit tests, and finally NASA style parallel development.

Except for unit testing, I question most of it. The problem with too much redundancy is that it slows you down. If you create too much ceremony, it takes 20 mediocre programmers to do poorly what 5 good programmers can do well.

I would much prefer good tools to redundancy, for example type inference over Java style type repetition. Maybe you can use asserts as a programming aid, but not in production. If you may get null values, deal with them; try not to create an exception for someone else to deal with. And if we used NASA style coding, it would take 5 years to get a web site up.
The best pitch is the one you don't see coming. I should have known better than to click on this axe grinding rant, but since I did here's my take:

- The guy grinds axes. Is he right? Is he wrong? It doesn't matter, he's going to be as loud and obnoxious as possible.

- He likes to talk about himself. I really don't need paragraphs about how he grew up in a loud, opinionated environment. (I was able to discern this on my own pretty quickly).

- He's an opportunist. I mean, the bar is really low here: should startups pay for ear time? Of course not. This is even less debatable than the brouhaha last week regarding Revolutionary Angel's competition [ http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=861767 ].

My impression is the slimy feeling you get when someone goes "out of their way" to help you, only to screw you later. I don't know how or when that might happen in this circumstance, but the whole post feels self-serving. (Maybe its an east coast spidey sense)

It might have something to do with this:

d) We are demanding that angel groups waive all fees starting today
e) We are going to crush any group that doesn’t comply with our demands
f) There is no negotiation

Apparently Calacanis is setting himself up as the VC police? This looks like a power grab for leverage over VC's via defamation. Last time I checked, Calacanis wasn't a newspaper or other journalistic organization beholden to the facts, or with clear separation of interests.
Good point, but I think it is at least plausible that if short term fun can change behaviour, long term (sustainable) fun should be able to do that, too.

Completely irrelevant anecdotal evidence: I like walking to work because it’s sustainably more fun than pretty much any other mode of transportation. Even if it’s less convenient.
0870 iPhone App Sales and Revenue Stats
That's an useless submission headline. Switch it to something that tells us what the article actually is.
I would def hire someone like that. He'd be the comedy relief for the rest of the team as we make our way through various crazy adventurous situations :D
Thanks for the tip. As a side note the wikipedia entry is probably one of the most in depth entry I have seen there:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalman_filter