skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The only reason that things like company loyalty and morale and doing meaningful work seem like life-threatening problems is because ACTUAL life-threatening problems - food, shelter, safety - have largely been solved [1].

So perhaps the solution is to have them spend a few months living in Darfur, and then see if they still complain about their 'stressful' office jobs. In other words, perspective - No matter how crappy your job seems, you're still doing better than approx. 99% of all humans who have ever lived.

[1] - Obviously poverty and hunger still exist even industrialized countries. But probably not for the people complaining about their jobs.
The tiny differences in implementation between the sun and ibm vm's is a regular source of deep and painful frustration for some of the people I work with.
I'm sorry, but I find mixing serif and sans serif characters to be somewhat jarring. I'm partial to the Proggy set of fonts.
roughly 90% of the comments are from people who got a bad impression of C++ during the pre-standardization days

Zawinski and Thompson are good, but they are not 90% of Zawinski, Thompson, Bloch, Eich, Ingalls, Armstrong and Steele. You're completely misrepresenting the gist of the article.

The comments that really drop my jaw are the people who seem to hold up Java as a "better" C++.

http://www.paulgraham.com/icad.html

but from its sketchy real-world performance

Oh please, don't start that flamewar with these kinds of uninformed, one sided utterances. Java performance has been more than fine for at least five years.
Cluster balloon flight in an office chair - done safely and legally
It's called the AppStore.

And of course it's also about controlling quality, are you kidding? Don't reduce this to only being about either one thing or the other — like you apparently love to do — it's obviously a multifaceted issue.

Quality has got to be one of the very primary concerns, Apple would absolutely hate for the iPhone to become a malware infested platform which consumers are afraid to download apps for, always on the look out for viruses, wondering if every unexpected behaviour is the fault of a trojan — like on a certain other platform.

Don't get me wrong, Apple don't just want quality because they're knights in shining armor — they want to make money. And how do you make money? First, make sure your customers feel completely secure and don't hesitate about downloading a new app for even a second. You cannot do that without very high quality apps, distributed in a very secure way. It's not malice, it's a win-win strategy. As has been proven in a plethora of ways.

While the walled garden of AppStore can definitely and be seen as a step backwards, don't you think that the unprecedented amount of apps AppStore makes available for a mobile phone — and the unprecedented amount of developers finally being able to make a living from developing mobile apps — represent a gigantic step forwards?

Once again it's ridiculous to reduce this complex setup to being just one of two things.

Don't be diplomatic. Be open to the fact that things aren't that simple. You'll never understand another's perspective if you don't even make an attempt to.
How Con Kolivas's BFS CPU scheduler works
Pretty sweet.

Sadly, the manufacturers take a long time to catch up to released Android versions. Almost makes users want to "wait a few months" before purchasing a phone.

I think Google needs to help those guys out so that they can get the releases earlier.
Archive.org also has a nice collection of (often free or CC-licensed) "Netlabel" music, much of it electronic.

http://www.archive.org/details/netlabels
IntelliJ makes it shockingly easy to add custom language support. The main problem is that the documentation is scant and scattered. I've never written a line of elisp (I've hardly even ever used emacs), so I can't compare. Anyone else?
Sorry, didn't really mean to imply it was intentional, i know these things get lost 'in the tubes' (although I did actually miss the source tagging the first time) - regardless, I stand by my post in support of Letters of note!
The computer is actually has a von Neumann architecture, that is, they have code and data in the same address space.

To the degree that C represents this reality, it is through exploits: e.g. buffer overflows, overwriting the stack and return address, and executing arbitrary code supplied by attackers. C itself does not represent the reality very well, since it does not lend itself to writing code that writes code at runtime.
The DevIL Image Library For Ruby
The original link is dead, but here's their site: http://hackerhouse.bluwiki.com/

It looks like they're also starting a place up in SF: http://hackerhouse.bluwiki.com/go/HH/San_Francisco
I use Ruby (via Rails and HacketyHack) the most, but I also code in Haskell, C, Javascript, D... and some others, just not very often.
You guys laugh...

Keep in mind that, at this point, microsoft was pretty much nothing...

Here was a guy that built something with the intent to sell it, and people said "too bad". Of course he was upset about that.

Now, should he have been philanthropic enough to have just given it away to the community? Maybe, but it doesn't really matter...he coded it, and he did so thinking he would be able to sell it.

I equate those that copied BASIC then to the people that use adblock now. No, they're not really harming the author, but it is a bit discourteous. I think he was just trying to illustrate that "C'mon, guys...I worked really hard on this...I'm not suing you, but just please buy it instead :)"
You gotta cook the beef & acquire the client so If ur in the restaurant biz it’s time flipping burgers and if ur in the product startup space it’s time on the phone [works way better than email]
Everybody talks about innovative products. Innovative sales & marketing is ignored
We have made inroads into accounts like Dell, Yahoo, Walmart & Google and it all started with tracking big guns at these organizations attending conferences, getting their phone numbers from conference organizers, calling up & requesting a meeting at venue – also to mention an innovative pitch. Definitely could not have been done by a sales ace to start with but definitely something we can teach a sales guy to replicate
Bottom line – if the founding team does it themselves its easy to build a scalable process
Free Books- deep title, I know :)

http://freebooksapp.com
This is only true to a degree.

The only reason you know what the C you write will end up doing on the machine is because you are generally not doing much when you're working in C.

If you want to get productive work done, you'll be leveraging lots of libraries written by third parties, and you have no more insight into how they are working when you're invoking them with C than Ruby, Python, Java, C#, or any other language.
First photo of Earth and Jupiter together, taken from Mars orbiter
What's the argument? I run www.langpop.com, so I'm interested in these kinds of things.
Dupe of http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=882397.

I thought hn code checked for dupes?

Ah--the above link will be wrong when new blog entry gets posted.
What hobbyist can put 3-man years into programming, finding all bugs, documenting his product and distribute for free?

This statement also sounds much more ironic from today's perspective, when there are thousands of open source projects that literally run off this concept.
Thank you putting this more eloquently than I have been able to. You are 100% correct.
Hm, active comment moderation on the blog. Anyway, someone has indeed done this for the iphone (not that I've used it or can comment as to how well it works):

http://www.moop.me/inap.php

It does appear to only cover one of his use-cases, sadly. But the others would be difficult without backgrounding (and the theft alarm may require far too much polling and battery drain to ever be useful.)
The Rise & Fall of a Billionaire Technology Hedge Fund Guru
I'm completely impressed even as it fits my mental model of possible causes. I've been an ardent egg boiler for years to make whites easy to eat. And only recently have I run into the pockmarked egg after boiling. It's horribly frustrating! But it makes sense. Only recently have I had really fresh eggs.

Now, knowing this, I'll just boil older eggs. It's a small victory, but a victory nonetheless!
The amount of royalties we have received from sales to hobbyists makes the time spent on Altair BASIC worth less than $2 an hour.

This was an early version "I did it, I should get paid for it" feeling of entitlement. If your intent is to make serious money, why would you spend your time doing something that ultimately paid only $2/hr? Why are you trying to sell to people who are unwilling or unable to pay for the product or service? These sound like an obvious recipe for failure. Fortunately for Microsoft, the deals they did that gave them a captive business audience who wanted to pay for DOS, as it became the defacto standard, this ranting was later moot.

And now Microsoft offers deep discounts and free stuff just to get you to use their products (for various business and marketing reasons).
YouTube’s Bandwidth Bill Is Low
Indeed, they even cite McGee.

I'd love to see that weaving article if there's any chance you can find it.
At least C# doesn't require you to allocate a file for your class, and a simple two-field class should consume no more than 5 lines of code. And if you're willing to use a generic tuple type, you don't need to declare a class at all; just use Tuple<Foo,Bar> as needed.
C++ is pretty awful to develop in, especially compared to many other languages. Some of these issues have to do with poorly designed features in the core language (templates), static variable instantiation, no good way for declaring complex data structures in the language (a'la JSON), multiple inheritance, etc.

But this isn't just a problem with the core language itself, but with the compilation model and linkage model - and the compilers and linkers. You need include guards on the top of your header files to make sure the code doesn't get re-included. You have to aggressively forward declare to work around declaration dependencies. And you have to trim the files that you include to keep compile times under control, because here's the fun thing about C++: For every .cpp file in your project, you will end up reading in and parsing the same damn header files again and again. In a large project, that might mean recompiling the same header files 1000s of times. Precompiled headers aren't a good solution, either - because when you have to touch the header, you pay a huge cost in recompiling the PCH.

In every other language I've used, I haven't had to worry about carefully restructuring code (sometimes at a cost in performance) to reduce compile times - because the core include and dependency mechanism sucks so badly.

Finally, C++ as a language is very poorly extensible. By this, I mean in compared to languages like LISP (with macros), or Ruby / Scala, which both make writing DSLs very easy. This is especially unfortunate, given that is so heavily used in a lot of very specific domains. And don't get me started on templates - I couldn't dream up a more backwards and awkward way of doing generics if I tried.
I'm curious how this compares to twisted.web/tornado in terms of use case (friendfeed type sites). Can anyone quickly explain this to me? Thanks!
Edit: Maybe it makes sense to hire a marketer or five? Also, lots of eye candy.

1. The longer we wait the more elisp is gonna be out there and the more painful continuing to maintain existing elisp, and the eventual transition will be. Nobody wants to be the one to muck through it all(for free), but the payoff if the project is successful is so huge I think the risk-to-reward ratio makes sense. Also, rewriting emacs would beat the hell out of most coding jobs out there.

2. Scheme was made to be as minimalist a language as possible, making it easier to wrap your head around the whole language. And more importantly, lowering the learning curve a little. (I've been bit in the ass by inconsistencies in how elisp handles things before.)

3. SICP is in scheme. I think it'd be great for the language people learn 'hello world' in to be very similar or identical the language they mod. their text editor in. A single smooth experience, instead of the jarring shock when you bump against elisps rough edges.

4.Again, lisp-1. I believe I could've spent lot less time writing in emacs-lisp if it had a single namespace. It certainly makes it easier to have code-as-data.
Earning and keeping trust is a very major part of sales--at least repeated sales--that I've learned about over the past year or two. Rip someone off and not only are they never coming back, but they're telling a bunch of people (~5) that you are untrustworthy. Big net loss in my book.
LACSS 2009: Domain Specific Languages and Haskell
The rule is (or at least was that that time) that a Canadian citizen receiving Canadian source income is always taxable in Canada.

However the sum was so small that I didn't owe any taxes on it. I still filed though.
Ruby, Hecl, Tcl, C, occasionally Javascript and other things like Erlang.
Dumb! The trick is:

- if the eggs are cold, then place them in hot water for a few minutes.

- If the eggs are hot, place them in cold water for a few minutes.

Once that's done, all eggs peel easily.
C#, Perl, a bit of scheme and lisp.
I think you're missing the point here.

A C program that accesses the memory will do so in an extremely predictable way, if I lay out a memory structure, a piece of code and an access pattern then I can be very sure about how that will interact with things like the caches.

In other languages where there is more 'under the hood' that is a lot harder.

Libraries don't enter in to the problem, that's another level altogether.

While it's true that library code written by third parties might be less (or more) efficient than the code you wrote, even those libraries will have the luggage of the underlying implementation of the language.

In C there is no implementation underneath, it is a 1:1 correspondence with machine instructions.

That is the reason that kernel code tends to be written in C.
This is not advice for survivalists. It is advice for people who want to lead an interesting life. In his case he wanted the freedom to travel and work on free software back in the 80s. His skills as a waiter provided a safety net that gave him the freedom to do that.

Growing your own crops would be an absurdly horrible strategy. Imagine that you're in a strange city and your wallet was just stolen. You have just a few days of reserve cash. Would you at this point prefer the fallback plan of, "Plant these seeds, wait for them to grow" or "Get a job as a waiter, eat immediately"?
The FED is walking a tightrope with the rest of the world right now, but it should be more afraid of it's own citizens.

I know 29% inflation over 10 years is chafing MY hide and it's all due to the FED's policies.
Thus proving the authors point even further.

It is funny how everybody really seems to have their own favorite subset of C++.
they found all the bugs??

but seriously, gates continues to maintain the fiction that open source = hobbyists not getting paid.
Does working on your serve improve your tennis game?
I appreciate your stance, but you completely missed my point.

The point was that users aren't exactly rational. Sure, they won't need a new OS, but Windows 7 is good, and on that merit alone people, especially with old XP machines, will switch.

While I don't like to argue with analgies, it is fitting here.

The example I made was the Sopranos. When the creator set out to write the show, he was told it would fail, as people didn't need another mafia show. After all, the Godfather came out in the 70s and there have been multiple similarly themed shows/movies since.

In summary, the only thing I was trying to point out, is that when people like something, they will get it. Regardless of whether they need it or not. For yet another easy example, people don't need a new ipod every 6 months, yet they continue to sell.
Economist.com: Google wants to shake up the digital book market
Thank you for the good wishes :) It's now 6 or so years later and I hope I have acquired enough skills to at least be able to make new mistakes rather than repeating old ones.
So the actual cost is somewhere between $0 and $1,000,000 per day. tl;dr we have no idea.
Try http://www.reviewboard.org/ or something like it
That's about 2,6% a year. Not bad, actually.
They seem to be more keen on crowdsourcing the 3D part, with that new Sketchup plugin.
Strong typing plus full OO = Bondage and Discipline language, where the size of the code itself starts to really drag your development and debugging time down

You're missing a crucial part of the equation: type inference. OCaml does what you want :-)
while the subject of the article is interesting, it's a rough read because of the author's seemingly ignorant suggestion that google abuse net neutrality, and the several typos. not really typical for wired.
One advantage of BFS is the fact that it is very simple: the sheer number of heuristics that have made their way into CFS have a tendency to cause all sorts of problems in--often rather important--pathological cases.

Here's one example from a recent commit:

http://patchwork.kernel.org/patch/47921/

The speed loss was so huge on what should have been an extremely easy load that it probably explains quite a few "Windows is faster than Linux" benchmarks I've seen over the past few months...
So, nothing changed in all that time. Micro-Soft found out the hard way that hobbyists are 'cheap'. And managed to sell a veritable fortune of software to nicely locked in businesses.

Meanwhile the 'hobbyists' slowly grew in numbers until they outnumbered the 'professionals' (and plenty of them were professionals during the day and 'hobbyists' in the evenings and weekends). And then the web happened, and Microsoft blinked and open source took it and ran with it.

And now, because of that they're facing the first real competition since their inception.

Google would not have happened if it hadn't been for linux, and Sun and SGI would still be in business as well.

The world is changing, rapidly. Let's hope it changes fast enough.
I've heard of a few companies that have this prerequisite, but only a few. I think open source contributions can tip the scales if you're up against a bunch of great candidates, but I don't think the business world works like you make it sound. In fact, I know lots of companies would actually shy away from open source contributors.
let's rephrase that a bit:

What hobbyist can put 3-man years into programming, finding all bugs, documenting his product and distribute for free for a living?
I know lots of companies would actually shy away from open source contributors.

That's great--a perfect way to filter out companies that I would never want to work for.
Eskil Steenberg - Creator of "Love" gives a talk.
Beyond the coolness of the game, his theory of more tools as a method of efficiently generating content is intriguing.
One ventures into a market hoping it would be profitable. It does not, so one tries to "train the customers".

That letter probably didn't increase sales.

But this guy and his company managed to hang around making revenues until they were approached as a partner by some large company that knew how to get customers to pay through their noses.
From my experiences, if we assume that Youtube's bandwidth costs are similar to what Akamai charges for an extremely large video site, and their claim of 1 billion videos viewed per day is correct, they're probably paying about $5-10 million per month. Obviously, if their bandwidth is cheaper than Akamai, adjust those numbers accordingly. And it might be larger if 720p HD being the default mode sticks (those have 4 times the bitrate of their regular videos).
That's funny, I equate someone who uses intrusive ads on his website to someone who writes a free BASIC interpreter that stops after every 12 lines and PRINTs an ad to my console.

If you're going to put something out there, free or otherwise, it's your problem to make sure that it's fit for my purpose.
I was wondering what they were going to do with all that dark fiber that they purchased, and now we can see.
The article mentions Harold McGee's "On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen" which is an awesome book for learning the science behind cooking. I'd totally recommend that book in the tradition of food/cooking hacking.
That is exactly how I took it, and it stands today.
Evolved virtual creatures (evolutionary programming, 1994)
It stands the test of time - 33 years later, developers are still complaining about the same things. I found that rather amusing - so much has changed yet much is still the same.

If you believe anything out of the BSA, last year was a record year with more than $50 billion in software piracy: http://global.bsa.org/globalpiracy2008/index.html
The War on Science Fiction and Marvin Minsky
Scaling Online Social Networks without Pains
The problem with that approach is that the effect tends to wear off faster and faster with each exposure and eventually a tolerance is built up.
I've been involved in developing NAEV [0]. Some of its music is "stolen" from other games under CC license, and some was produced by players.

You can start by borrowing music from other games and put an announcement (on forums, mailing lists, in game) saying that you need music. If people like your game somebody with musical skills will help you creating soundtracks eventually. Just don't expect this to happen overnight. NAEV has been under development for over 6 years.

[0] http://github.com/bobbens/naev
Are there enough jobs in the world for a population of 6 billion?

This is usually answered by pointing backwards and seeing that previous times of technological disruption were followed by new jobs in new industries as people demanded new kinds of goods and services in the new economy.

But at some point, does our capacity to increase our consumption in order to demand the same amount of labor with exponentially growing productivity reach a breaking point? Farm equipment almost operates itself. Self service technology keeps expanding its scope. Factories become ever more automated.

One thing that has been going on for a while now, is stock prices and profits continuing to increase in the face of massive unemployment and negative wage growth. How else to interpret that but that corporations can continue to increase production without increasing headcount? Or, more likely, reducing head count without decreasing production.

This is all very vague and anecdotal, but it seems to me that economic production is starting to become decoupled from labor and wages. Can anyone point out what it is that I'm missing?
Its cake on my pre. Its literally just a crontab entry and curl command and the phone tweets its gps at intervals. It be easy to watch for a tweet outside a range and alert me. Seems to add no battery drain at all. I'll have to see if I can add playing a sound locally as well.

http://palmpre-hacks.com/palm-pre-hacks/how-to-tweet-palm-pr...
The absence of response is perhaps its own response ;-)
Go hang out on demoscene music forums and IRC channels. I'm sure there are plenty of musicians that would be happy to pitch in some music for some recognition.
Joshua Klein on the intelligence of crows
I know lots of companies would actually shy away from open source contributors.

Which companies? Why do you think they do?
I would hate to have my gps location constantly be tweeted, personally, but that's an awesome hack.
Money is supposed to represent value, but I think it might be suited to material value specifically, as opposed to immaterial value. The legal situation rapidly approaches ridiculousness as more immaterial value is introduced.