skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Don't be insulted; it's just an argument on the internet. Besides, the correlation people like me are claiming is at most a statistical pattern with lots of room for variation. (You sound like a good programmer regardless. But what I find endearing in your comment is how you go and spoil your argument by hacking on an iPhone app in your spare time - and feel obliged by intellectual honesty to fess up to it!)

Of course, you might also mean that the debate is insulting because it's pointless. I can understand why it would seem that way. What does it matter whether someone programs outside of their job or not? It doesn't, intrinsically.

Here's why I think the subject is interesting anyway: there's no cheap way to tell who the really good programmers are. This is not just a hard problem, it's a hard problem that seems like it ought to be an easy one. Why can't you just devise a test? People have tried to figure this out every which way, spending many millions, maybe billions in the process. And no one has a good answer. That's genuinely surprising.

Given that situation, any criterion one can use as a (cheap) proxy for "good programmer" is of interest, even if it's imperfect.

What makes the "hacks in spare time" correlation with "good programmer" interesting is not that it captures all of the good programmers. There are certainly good ones who don't do that; i.e. the test does produce false negatives. What makes it valuable anyway is that it excludes the overwhelming majority of bad programmers, the ones for whom it's a job that they aren't very good at and aren't motivated to get good at, who form 90% if not 99% of the professional population. In short, the test is interesting because it excludes many more false positives than it admits false negatives.

A corollary is that all the people who protest "I don't code in my spare time, yet I am a good programmer" aren't really adding much data to the discussion. The ones we need to hear about are the bad programmers who do. :)
My personal distinction:

- A website is just that. A website on the internet, usually consisting of HTML, CSS, Images and Javascript.

- A startup is a venture to start a profitable company.

For a website to be considered a startup, there has to be some case where one could make a sound argument it will be able to make more revenue that it costs to maintain (and the incurred cost of building it)
Looks very interesting. I have downloaded it. Pity about the Collecta API limit though.
I clicked on the tour and noticed the graphing feature - this should be on the front page. To me, seeing progress / time is more useful than a stopwatch app by itself.
This is a tangent to your main point, but:

"Statistics suggest that most successful startup founders have three failures under their belt before they make it big. It doesn't have to be that way. While nothing can replace hard-earned experience, people can and do learn from other people's mistakes. I'm a firm believer that a couple of simple (in hindsight) lessons can significantly increase the overall success rate."

I suspect that the "3 failures before a successful startup" statistic already includes learning from other people's mistakes. Why? Because these startup founders were eventually successful. That indicates they had a capacity to learn from their mistakes (either that, or got really really lucky), and most people who can learn from their own mistakes are more than happy to learn from others'. They've probably already read up everything they could on successful and unsuccessful former founders.

The ones who haven't are the folks that are on their 10th (or 30th) startup and still haven't got traction. That happens to some people...they bounce from dream to dream without ever making any of them come true, because they never fix the fundamental problems with their assumptions.

What I've found - in both programming and startups - is that I needed a basic level of experience before all the advice I'd read even started to make sense. So I read up on all these software development methodologies, but until I actually had to work on large software projects and manage the complexity that inevitably popped up, I didn't understand the why behind the practices, and so didn't know how to apply them correctly. It's like all the debates on TDD that have been popping up: they miss the point entirely, because the question isn't "Are unit tests good are bad?", it's "When are unit tests useful, and when do they cost you more work than they save?"
At first, I thought this was just a one-page javascript demo. After watching the screencast, I can see there's more to it than that.

I'm not sure anyone will really use the online timer, it just doesn't fit with most scenarios where you need a stop watch.

I like the graphing / tag filtering system. It's your strongest feature. Could be useful for freelancers to track their hours on various projects. If you can come up with a way to get data into it that doesn't involve leaving a browser tab open, you've got something. Alternatively, come up with a really easy way to enter times manually.

Side note: If you're going to record speech for a demo video, use a windscreen on the mic to avoid those popping sounds (you can make your own by wrapping some light cloth around the mic).
I highly recommend

MinTTY for Cygwin instead of Console2 for cmd.exe
Everything instead of Locate32.
I like the astute observations being made, but I'd like to suggest that leverage is a bad thing for startups in a developed economy. I think everything stated still holds if you substitute "equity investment" for leverage, and the result for everyone tends to be better.
I'm not arguing for the guy's point. I just don't think politics should be taken too personally.
I understood the paradox but did not buy the explanation at all.
Thank you. I've installed Shades and it seems good so far. I'll try it tonight to see if I find real-world benefits to it.
> More importantly, though, I'm a mountain guy, not a jungle guy.

Were you just trying to show how ignorant you are? Anyone going to Brazil would be going to Southeast/South of Brazil, far from "the jungle". Another option for tech people is in Recife (State of Pernambuco), in the Northeast and close to the beach.

Anyway, please let's stop with silly stereotypes. Saying that we are mostly "jungle guys" is no different than saying than Americans are about corn.
It can have a catastrophic effect on the web. Javascript validation would not be able to handle all the digits. I wonder how the Zimbabweans handled it?

Seriously don't worry. It will have to adjust sometimes to reflect the real economy and the deficit. I lived in South Africa for quite a few years. At one stage the Rand halved its value almost overnight. (Big changes happen overnight) and lost more gradually over the years. It did not affect the 'buying power' in the country though. So unless you want to get up and go to Europe keep your money invested in the US. It is a great country and the economy has a tendency to re-adjust quickly. (By the way in Europe they worry similarly about the Euro).

If you have a lot of dollars under your pillow change some to Chinese Money. At worse you can go for a holiday there!
The point to be taken, whether the article states it or not, is that you can choose to code outside work, or you can choose to not code outside work, and neither choice is mutually exclusive to enjoying your life or being good at your work.

How much your work life and your after work life resemble each other is entirely up to you. People who judge you based on that (in either direction) are to be avoided.
I received an acceptance email at darwinrlo@gmail.com but have since forgotten my password. My username is darwinrlo. How do I go about getting my password reset?
I haven't used it yet, but Retrospectiva (open-source, rails) looks great:
http://retrospectiva.org/
Please define 'collapse'.
Good if it ever happens I will get a good night's sleep!
Yeah, Panera Bread is great. I often find Starbucks, or your preferred coffee shop, to have a more fast paced environment, with people shuffling in and out constantly, which makes it difficult for me to concentrate and get work done. Panera's atmosphere is really calm and slower paced, not to say they don't get any business because they do get lots. Also, as one of the very first places to offer free and unlimited wifi, in my area at least, Panera holds a special place in my heart.
(You know a thread is getting too big when you have to click "parent" to figure out if someone is talking to you...)

I'm going to go out on a limb and say that you don't have children

Heh. Wrong.

I'm afraid your inferencing could use a little sharpening. If you're correct about this (and you may well be)...

Your anecdotal observations about parents did little to advance your point

... then there's probably some extraneous reason why I'm so hung up on the matter of parenting, programming, and spare time. I wonder what that could be? (And how is it that I know so many programmers with small children...)
http://www.investchile.com/corfo_det_20080714144946.aspx

It is 17% but...

"An additional tax of 18% is levied if companies distribute or remit earnings."
I'm not sure I'd consider GUI design as easy and boring, just requiring a different set of skills to most programming work. Designing a good UI can be extremely difficult.

I also don't understand why you can't automate things like saving and restoring settings. It seems to me that there are plenty of things interesting things you can do in a UI framework.
PubSubHubbub vs. RSSCloud : market shares
> To this day I have not grasped what she meant with this story.

The story is from a 19th century Turkish book: "The Turkish Jester: Or The Pleasantries Of Cogia Nasr Eddin Effendi" (http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/16244).
"why didn't Next take over the world"

You could make a strong argument they did. Next and Apple is often cited as a case where the bought company took over the buyer.

Netscape and Collabra is another, less successful, and recently modish example.

(not a fan of the great man theory in general though)
"So, I rigged up a Python script to play AOL instant messenger sounds randomly every 5 to 10 seconds, turned up my speakers, pointed them at the wall, and went on vacation for a week."

ARE YOU F'ING KIDDING ME? You write a blog post on hiring and then proceed to relate a story about how you escalated a personal conflict way beyond reason? This is precisely the kind of guy you don't want on your team, because working in the real world involves resolving personal conflict without needlessly pissing people off.
Judging by the post he has more of an anti-PR talent.
At an initial glance it looks like a forkbomb, but it isn't. The program is never going to get past:

for (;;) {
printf blah blah
}

So the fork() call is only going to get executed once. It just fills your screen with lots of text, which doesn't "fuck yo memry."
Swedes.
I like the idea, but isn't it possible to monitor files for changes by any program, so that this isn't tied to Eclipse or one of finite other environments?
I used to to use yasql as a sqlplus replacement, it was pretty basic but much better.
Supposedly, the loss of the battleships was not prevented, as the Navy knew they were useless in modern warfare. This smacks of internal struggle and politics, between the two camps of naval warfare, carrier-based and battleship. The carrier guys took advantage of the situation to eliminate their opponents crown jewels.
The entire thing hinges upon the fact that the set is defined to be infinitely dense, and that if you divide infinity by two (or, really, more), you will still have infinity - thus, if it is possible to subdivide a sphere into two sets with the same radius, and the original sphere was infinitely dense, the two resulting spheres will have the same radius, and be infinitely dense - and thus pretty much identicle to the original. The rest is just discussing various other aspects of it, so that their structure is also the same.

As for your grand-mother's story, I don't have a clue either - my best guess is that it's something about love not caring about how little sense something makes, but that doesn't entirely make sense.
If a merchant doesn't want to be on our site, all they have to do is ask and we'll remove them.

The merchant is our friend. We bring them customers and sales. We avoid the things they hate, like linking customers away to another site. We also have some future features in mind that they'll really like.

We're also willing to let them run plurchase on their own servers, and in the future, will offer white-label functionality.
TextMate~

esc for function name autocomplete
//todo: comments in the source appear when you hit ctrl-shift-t
cmd-shift-t search by method name
cmd-shift-f search for phrase within entire project
ftp+ssh bundle
Well my major complaint is that everyone goes "Why doesn't the Kindle have colour or a touchscreen?" when the answer is: "Because it's e-ink and it's really pleasant on the eye, and is black and white because that's what it is, and it's not a touchscreen because it's not possible with e-ink". Basically, e-ink is far better than LCD's, so any device with an LCD is missing the whole point of the Kindle.
the real question: will it help a musician mate?
ya, well, I can relate, you know, cause I'm a Pisces, and I'm also a unicorn, so that basically makes me Superman. I suggest you pay me a lot of money and don't tell me what to do. If you treat me like a princess maybe I'll let you piggyback on my fabulous talent all the way to the bank cause I'm such a nice guy.
At least there was a lesson ;)

My first job out of college was with a high-end security company (biometric systems at Langley, DOD, etc.) I was hired by the National Sales Director. They flew me across the country and put me up in a nice hotel for my first meeting with the CEO and for training on their monitoring systems. They had spent at least a few grand on my trip.

I walked into the first meeting, and the CEO looked up and saw me. "Get that motherf*cker out of my sight!!!! I don't want to see him again until he's fixed!!!" He was apoplectic. A bunch of no-neck guys from Philly and NYC (I was later told some of the investors were mobsters) ushered me out of the room. I was shaken up, because it was my first job and I had no idea what I had done wrong. The guy who hired me told me to go back to the hotel and enjoy the pool...and that he would talk to me later. No indication as to whether I was fired or what was going on. My nerves went to hell while I was waiting for him to call me. And my wife wanted to know why my 'important meetings' had only lasted three minutes.

It turns out the CEO has a huge issue with non-white dress shirts. He thought anything other than plain white was unprofessional and offensive. (I was wearing a blue dress shirt that my wife had bought me as a gift.) He decided he would rather waste several thousand dollars and have me come back another time than see a non-white dress shirt. He was successful enough that most people humored his eccentricities. [I had another boss that would go absolutely nuts if you shut any door in the building. He would almost foam at the mouth. He had a phobia of closed doors because of something that had happened to him in foster care. He fired at least one girl because she kept shutting doors out of habit.]

I think if a boss is going to have frequent asylum-quality meltdowns, it's nice when you can at least learn something beyond "This person is crazy. Be careful." It sounds like Steve learned an important lesson, even if the instructor was unpleasant.
Lol, ahhh, I almost feel out of my chair after reading this.
Has everybody forgot about the invasion of China? The rape of Nanking? And when does an oil embargo cause another country to take up arms in a sneak attack?

Come on, guys, Japan always had the option of terminating their belligerence. There was a legitimate reason for the oil embargo, and it wasn't to provoke a war.

Geesh.
No, vice versa, Raganwald links to the Reddit post (http://github.com/raganwald/homoiconic/blob/master/2009-10-0...)
For many more (and rather better written) Nasredin stories (all of which are highly interesting, entertaining, illuminating, or all three at the same time), see my father's story-blog:

http://nasredin.blogspot.com/

Start from the first one:

http://nasredin.blogspot.com/2007/10/yes-there-is-nothing-ne...
CodeRack - a competition to develop top quality Rack middleware
Have you ever said "That's odd, I just learned about this obscure fact/company/place/concept the other day and now it popped up again". That's the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon. So I increased the counter of my Baader-Meinhof occurrences. By the way, you'll hear about this again in a few days. :)
I'm forever intrigued by the mind's ability to discern patterns. Today I realized that just from the few examples that appeared on HN, my mind has - quite unconsciously - locked on the combination of google.com in the site slot and a title about programming and its methodology. "Oh, it's that yacoset person", my mind tells itself without words, and I feel a little jolt of recognition-cum-disappointment (for the pieces are usually fluffy and fussy). I distrust myself, and so I hover over the link to make sure, yet so far the pattern has held without fail.
Keeping short ToDo lists for every project (not necessarily software) that I do which contain only the next 5-8 things to do next. Writing down a little note along with the todo to help me restore state next time i work on the project.
Ok, here is what I have always wanted to have:

1. Superfast mode: when im writing bugs/comments out while on the phone to users, I don't have time to write a full bug report. Let me throw them in there quickly, using a single textbox/page (no reloads). I don't want to see the bug after i put it in - i just want to enter them quickly.

2. Quick sorting. I need to be able to pick bugs from a list and throw them into a version/milestone. Drag and drop, no page reloads.

This is what bugs me about trac. Jira solves this with greenhopper, but it's pretty ugly. I'm sure you could simplify it and make it easier.
I detect sarcasm here, but that's ok. The thing is that suggesting things isn't very productive. If you want employers to pay you a lot of money and not tell you what to do, you should demonstrate that you're worth a lot of money and work best without being told what to do.
I've started doing that also. I'm using 37signals Tada List which has a nice iPhone web app for managing lists on the go.
Original feature, personally I don't like to count minutes of work because 5 minutes of good concentration is much more better than a hour of sleepy mouse clicking , but I am sure there is people that will find it useful.
Sure, same with simple CMSes, but I still wouldn't suggest writing one yourself.
This is what happens when your mother in law uses IE
Yet we all know who he is.
google.com is a website. it's not a ... startup?
I've been runnning it for about 3 months, and its great. Every once in a while I'll turn it off to work in Photoshop, and the brightness of the screen is jarring.

It fixed a problem I didn't know I had.
"I'm pretty sure this is a comprehensive list. Can anyone think of anything I've left out?"

Seems like an overly confident statement that has low probability of being correct. Is this purposely to provoke people into trying to prove you wrong? If so, maybe it's genius, though dishonest.

Here's my shot:

The comments on the post also mention finance was left out. Well, if we take finance to be a combination of moving things and storing things, it sort of covers part of what's going on, but there's a missing key: lending things. Taking it in reverse, lending by itself wouldn't be enough either, since without moving things and storing things, you can't lend out anything you don't already have.

Anyways, I'm pretty sure I came up with an airtight metaphor for finance. Can anyone think of how the metaphor breaks down?
IMHO this isn't about politics. Political issues include: strategies in foreign policy, the introduction of new taxes, the reform of the health system etc. I wouldn't care if somebody posted commentaries pro/contra this or that position. A political statement doesn't refer to the opponents race, gender etc. though.
Plus dependable programmers are fired last.
At first I wasn't seeing backed up claims for "shutting down the Internet"... I read that over one time and I thought, okay, they're talking about (new) cybersecurity applications for already existing Federal and Department of Commerce systems and implementations. So I thought, okay - providing more security for governmental systems is a good thing, right?

Then I read it through a second time:
"The bill also calls on the Department of Commerce to establish and maintain a clearinghouse on information related to cybersecurity threat and vulnerability information to public and private infrastructure deemed "critical" by the President. The Secretary of Commerce would be given access to this information "without regard to any provision of law, regulation, rule, or policy restricting such access." The bill would also give the President new authority to "declare a cybersecurity emergency and order the limitation or shutdown of Internet traffic to and from any compromised Federal Government or United States critical infrastructure information system or network.""

''deemed critical'' ? I welcome your opinion, but to me that seems like too much power for one person. I'd say Google is quite critical... so let me get this straight, Rockefeller wants to allow the President to be able to shut down anything (like Google) he feels is necessary? pfft I think I'd like to recommend these old fogie Senators to actually use the Internet - don't attempt to interfere with something you don't understand.
most awful piece of graffiti ever, more so than people who have stupid tags.
3.1 required you to do those things regardless of whether you upgraded or not :)
Can we get a mute button? For those discussions that stay at the top for hours and usually degenerate into name calling anyway?
Ted is like Ali G / Borat / Bruno. It's a lot more fun to sit back and enjoy the show than it is to scold him for being an ass. Esp when he's so obviously going out of his way to be an ass. And like Ali G's antics, the AOL script was really funny. I hope he open sources it.
The DMCA is, itself, a racket and was designed right from the start to be.
for those who want to have a go at a better/more mathematical exposition, http://www.math.hmc.edu/~su/papers.dir/banachtarski.pdf is an excellent rigorous exposition.