skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've been using the Nike Free 3 Series sneakers for the past 2 months or so and have noticed greatly reduced lower back pain. My feet were sore for about 2 weeks while I adjusted to the shoes but after that, I feel that they were a great purchase.

They are much lighter than the average sneaker and every time I put on my dress shoes it feels like I have lead weights attached.

The Vibram "shoes" would get a lot more attention but the Nike will get the job done.

I should have bought more than 1 pair since they are incredibly hard to find now in certain sizes.
Some researchers hypothesize that one possible reason some Asian cultures show proficiency in math at an early age ironically has nothing to do with math – it has to do with language.

Which researchers? I see no references in that post. What is this, appeal to imaginary authority?

How many other languages, besides English and Chinese, can the author count in? What he describes is not so earth shattering, plenty of other languages are uniform and generative wrt to counting words.
If not iPhone, how is a web-hating programmer to strike rich?
It's hard not to see that as a list of clients of consulting firms rather than a list of serious open source software built with TDD.

I know the Rubinious project was built aiming to use TDD and it doesn't seem to have gone anywhere YET. As far as I can tell, a compiler is one beast that needs a strong abstract design first rather than a set of tests first - but I'm prepared to be surprised.

Pivotallabs lists Twitter first but I would be rather surprised if someone could verify that a substantial part of Twitter's app has been built using TDD (go ahead, surprise me).
Mint CEO unveils global expansion plan
Diesel?
http://dieselweb.org/lib/

Hurricane?
http://github.com/ericflo/hurricane
I get a similar feeling when the word "zealot" gets thrown around.
Temple Grandin is also the subject of the first episode of Errol Morris' show First Person. Highly, highly recommended.
I don't think it's that difficult with proper reference to historical examples. The first socialist welfare programs in Europe were instituted by authoritarian, nationalist, militarist Prussian leadership shortly following the unification of Germany. It was part of Bismarck's strategy to undercut the republican reformist sentiment left over from 1848, and bind the common people to the state through conservative handouts.

Another interesting book looks at the welfare programs instituted in Nazi Germany as part of their corporatist 'third way' economic system (supposed to avoid reliance on free trade industrialism and inoculate against cosmopolitan bolshevist appeals): http://www.amazon.com/Hitlers-Beneficiaries-Plunder-Racial-W...

Right-leaning socialism was the original socialism in practice in Europe.
Striking it rich aside, a "a web-hating programmer" is going to have a lot of trouble these days. No matter what project you start on, completely avoiding the web is one way to make sure that your competitors will one day get the best of you.

If you're talking about simply avoiding 'web apps,' there's still decent money to be made in desktop applications. But, as with almost all industries, there are two ways to strike it rich: get really lucky, or work really hard.

edit: now that I think about it, you might be able to get a couple years out of µC work without dealing with the web, but that's more hardware than software.
This is why I record screencasts for anything that could possibly go wrong in a live presentation. This also frees you from having to remember exactly everything you wanted to do in which order. You only need to remember what you're narrating.
Unless my reading comprehension is extremely poor today he is saying Snow Leopard has the same level of filetype functionality as Windows 3.0 which is simply not true.
I think we see eye to eye here. The sort of "one level up" thing is what initially attracted me to spec testing because that seemed to not only give you tools for performing your tests, but also helped direct you towards what would be useful to test: the behaviors of the code that you actually care about. So when I use spec testing tools, I tend not to think about making sure that the low level function traverses the directories in a particular way, but rather that all of the directories have been renamed (for example).
110% agree. It's the same gripe I have with Linux too.
He doesn't reuse the password all over the net. He uses many google services, and each requires his gmail password. It's google that's forcing him to authenticate himself via gmail.
Perhaps education makes the difference because a literate population can more effectively hold its government to account. Consider the proliferation of rabble-rousing newspapers, associated with every political stripe, during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centures in the US.
"matter of preference" == "a case for configurability"

Personally, I'm with you. I like the simplicity of the one-app-per-extension model. When I want to edit something, it's easy enough to open it in TextMate.
Now would be a great time for someone to chime in here and explain why people pay lots of money for JIRA and Confluence. I'm sure there's a good reason, I just don't don't what it is.
Thanks for giving me the laugh of the day! :D
One of the big barriers for me to consider the web replacing the desktop is device support for the browser. Does anyone know of a way for web applications to talk to devices like digital cameras, video game paraphernalia, music instruments? Will atlas solve this problem?
Even before I clicked on the comments, I expected a response from you debunking the points in the article. :-)
Sturgeon's Law Corollary: 90% of people will buy crap.
Yes, mainly because pmap is an early demo of how one could do parallelism in Clojure. It remains useful for mapping very heavyweight functions across relatively small data sets. It is not a substitute for Fork/Join, which is on the way.
The survival rate for both groups is exactly 0%.
You mean hard problems that matter.

There are a lot of hard problems startups try to solve which no one cares about. That's the trap to avoid.

Fixing something hard does not inherently make your company valuable in the marketplace.
Should Twitter buy OneForty
So when you have such a powerful "master" password, you shouldn't go blabbing it to a bunch of websites with unknown security. You have to trust it with Google, by nature, but using different passwords elsewhere means that leaks on other sites are contained.
I strongly suspect your last sentence is the key!
What I'm saying is if you use the same password for everything, that makes it more likely they can get the gmail password.

Take, for example, the reddit password leak. A clever attacker can probably guess my email from my username. If I had used my gmail password for my reddit password, now they have access to everything. But, since I don't cross contaminate my password like that, I didn't risk my gmail account.
A better comparison than Chicago is Argentina's neighbor Chile, which is far less endowed than Argentina and has been poorer historically. Chile, however, has pursued market economics since the 1980s and now enjoys a living standard that is more than twice as high as Argentina.

Indeed, Argentina's per capita income today is just $6,500, despite the nation's amazing cultural and natural gifts. Argentina is, in fact, highly literate-- I don't think that explains why it has stumbled.
Ask HN:If we are so good at proj management why do 50% of projs get shelved
What are you pet project management hates and what stops your projects from going bad?
Google's new culture: Perks are out. Being grateful you have a job is in
I wonder if anyone's done any old-west historical fiction with a mild-mannered, quiet, but well respected general store owner who is actually a scheming Machiavellian underneath?
I guess that is free, if all of your time is worthless. Good customer service and PR is a good thing, but it's certainly not "free."
"Sure, GDP diminished but that was part of the cost to make Argentina an industrialized nation."

That sentence doesn't even make sense. The whole point of industrialization is to boost economic output. That's what it does almost by definition.
No. * is most definitely not Unix. Unix is Unix. Anything else is not Unix.
Typically you don't refer to acquisition cost in terms of $/user/year. The $30 was referring to revenue/user/year. That doesn't preclude your point that they had to approach user acquisition much differently than Twitter or Facebook.
Startup StackOverflow
I grabbed http://startups.stackexchange.com/ since it was available. I would like it to be a community resource the way StackOverflow has been for development. Let me know how you would like to see it used.
Children as young as five 'using the Internet without parental supervision'
I wish I could send this to my boss. The functionality I'm working on right now was requested by a single client and is really only applicable to their unique billing situation. Why am I spending so much time on something that is going to have so little payoff, and yet which adds so much additional complexity to the system? But I've only been here a month and I don't feel like I can cast a dissenting voice. Maybe I'm just a coward.
So your role in all this is to defend his erroneous point?
I'm convinced that on these new anyone-can-make-an-app platforms (e.g. facebook, iphone, android), your best shot to make money is to be one of the first out with a product, then with that experience go freelance.

The markets become saturated too quickly. After a while, your problem becomes advertising rather than product quality. The only way I see to survive somewhat reliably later on is to diversify and become a portal/aggregation company.
I never said it was a carefully designed experiment.

This post has been up for an hour and already my site has surpassed the number of hits it received in the previous 24 hours. That implies to me that the title makes a significant impact. You don't need to have a control group to learn something interesting with a reasonable degree of confidence.
Pretty harsh. Every entrepreneur I know is on an emotional roller-coaster, but that's one aspect of our role that we don't tend to talk about. Often the toughest issues might seem trivial from an outsider's perspective, or even from your own perspective after some time has passed.

I recognized a lot in his account, and it was good to see someone being honest about the internal drama, even at the risk of appearing ridiculous.
No, he says that it's like gmail's password is his password for everything, since someone can then reset his other passwords; not that he uses gmail's password for everything.
This is a really powerful point. Observation and commentary help a lot -- reading other people's blogs, and comments on mine.

The process of preparing what I've done for somebody else's consumption is probably the most valuable thing I do for my own expertise. Keeping a developer blog gives me deeper insights into what I'm doing because I have to explain them.
Another similar, and superficially easy, improvement in the level of conversation would be if, instead of claiming X "sucks" or "rocks" in absolute terms, people ranked things against other known items.

For example, if you think unit testing is generally good but TDD is a bad idea then give some context to that: is TDD worse than no unit tests at all? Is it worse than low unit test coverage say 20, 30, 40%? Or off at a tangent TDD makes Java programming feel like Ruby (or vice versa), just something for people to intellectually grab onto in terms of scale.

I ask because not unit testing at all seems (to me) to be further from unit testing than TDD is, yet from this current discussion it would appear that unit test fans have more issues with the latter than the former.
Hoist by your own petard?
The thing is, they ship even to countries without wireless connectivity (e.g. Belarus). You have to use your computer to make purchases there.

The reason I though why local Amazon stores are deciding factor is that they already know the market there, have presence, etc.
A few restaurants and bars around Austin are giving Mayors discounts on food/drinks for as long as they hold the title. The game element is very enticing in this regard for both players and local businesses.

I agree with you about critical mass.
They had better not get rid of that 20% of your time on a pet project perk. That is an inherent strategic advantage.
I think it is a question from the crowd that John Hennessy is trying answer.
One of the comments on the original post claims open source apps don't count because they "are not subject to many of the challenges the average developer faces in a corporate environment" so it appears TDD fans can't win either way.

But since you're looking for open source success stories there was some very positive noises about TDD from a Twisted dev recently:

"I would strongly recommend at least practicing some TDD, too. Learning how to write tests was useful for me, but practicing TDD really expanded my design skills in a bunch of surprising directions that were almost unrelated to testing. I originally felt as you do, that I wasn't disciplined enough to do it; now I feel like I'm too undisciplined not to do it ;-)."

From: http://glyph.twistedmatrix.com/2009/09/diesel-case-study-in-...

Though he specifically states that Twisted didn't start out TDD, which he regrets, but maybe that disqualifies it.

Regarding Rubinius (and JRuby that was listed in the original post) I'm not sure trying to create a spec for an existing language implementation and then try to meet it would count as "true" TDD if people care about such differences. But maybe they do TDD for other bits lower in the stack, I'm not sure.
I guess it depends on the friends and family. If they can afford to lose $100k and they understand the risks, which for me would mean they've been there before and not just that they're telling you they understand the risks, then no I wouldn't have a problem.
If I get 10k from one friend who has a million, 50k from another who has 5 million and maybe several 1k investments from others, it would be less painful if things fell through. One would have to be rather up-front about the incredible risk involved and have a huge amount of trust with many parties beforehand.
Of course, I meant developing for the web (beyond static web sites). I hate the accidental complexity of web apps and, frankly, that's not where my expertise is.

My languages of choice are Python for prototyping and (modern) C++ for the actual development. I enjoy working on machine learning types of projects and thinking about algorithms.
AutoCAD resale ruling a messy win for first-sale doctrine
The alternative to preforking is select(2), which lets you get away with a single-process server and avoid IPC in certain scenarios: http://www.lowtek.com/sockets/select.html

I think Boa and thttpd use select instead of forking for clients.
Should Twitter Buy Oneforty?
My pet hate is lack of change control and a lack of contingency and change budget. Also why don't clients or stakeholders ever want to pay for good documentation?
The real numbers behind Aaron Patzer's (Mint.com) growth strategy
I think it's a mistake to go for the startup with the idea that the MBA is some sort of "backup plan". When the going gets rough -- and PG assures us it will -- that "backup plan" suddenly starts to look attractive and you end up in the worst possible situation, torn between two paths.
I'm pretty sure one of the most notable things about Google is Larry and Sergey's ability to avoid this, going back all the way to when they raised VC. They split the funds between rival firms Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Sequoia Capital and kept control of the company for themselves.
In the old days creator codes weren't invisible because they determined the file's icon. Now that icons are thumbnails that's no longer the case.
You have to combine select with processes or threads if you want to take advantage of SMP like these examples do.
George R. R. Martin's A Dance with Dragons hits 1100 pages
Americans are for Mars and Russians for Venus
We're not talking about file types; we're talking about which app is used to open a file.
What's wrong with asking startup-related questions here, keeping everything local and cultivating a discussion around them?
"Hennessy... remarks that companies are great things, but they are missing most of what makes a university so appealing to its employees: the freshness and excitement of the students and the freedom to conduct one's own research."

That's why google (which cultivated a collegial environment)
was able to attract so much talent. But maybe that's about to change: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=867491
It used to be the case that the file's icon represented the file's type. But with icon previews, that's no longer the case, so the extension is the only visible means of conveying the file type.
He's the CEO of a company that may eventually want to get funded.

While I applaud his openness, I wonder if he's shooting himself in the foot by airing this much dirty laundry.
After this, re-read:

http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/09/good-agile-bad-agile...

Start at the text "(cue happy rat)".
The conclusion is that the HN population has become prone to sensationalism?
Yesterday's (poor) discussion of this paper: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=865310
I actually wouldn't say this is very controversial, ORM is a problem that (in some ways) is fundamentally intractable. There is some great reading on this subject with an article titled "The Vietnam of Computer Science" (http://blogs.tedneward.com/2006/06/26/The+Vietnam+Of+Compute...). This was pretty eye opening for me and I think it's a must read for any web developer (or anyone using ORM for that matter).
Some day people will look back and pinpoint that the day the free snacks were taken away was the day that Google started to be just like every other company...
For the sake of free-market policies and rampant industrialization, people are displaced without their consent.

If people are losing their land without their consent, then the market isn't free. I guess we're losing the original meaning of "free market", here, which is just the latest in a list of such redefinitions to suit whatever the politicians want to do, while saying nice things. The euphemism treadmill strikes again! :)
Google Voice Add-on Development
They're just harder to find, so sometimes the same questions keep getting asked over and over again. I'm not trying to force this, just facilitate it if there's interest.
Well, you know, we've all got problems. I'm sure some people on this site have experienced hardship and risk that goes far beyond flubbing a demo.
Just a meta comment about these lessons learned posts. The motivation behind these is to promote the product in question and one must therefore take them with a grain of salt.

Peer reviewed research is more reliable.
Depending on the situation, the mall owners may have no actual recourse anyway. I know in my state, a "no guns allowed" restriction isn't enforceable for an entire mall unless every business in the mall posts a "guns not allowed" sign.

But, he could always be charged with stuff like disturbing the peace.
Facebook launches events API
His life is not on the line. He will have the opportunity to take more risks in the future. When he tries out armed robbery, I'll start to believe he's putting his life on the line.
This meme is a silly amateur-hour wheel re-invention and ignorance of history.

The fact is, pre-forking a pool of processes without implementing a per-process multiple-connection event mechanism is going to be grossly inefficient in terms of memory utilization (ie, you need to use select, poll, kqeueue, etc.).

You can claim otherwise (COW pages et al), but history is not on your side (look at the scalability of existing pre-fork/connection-per-process network daemons). Think about it -- how much of the runtime can truly be shared across connection handlers?

The fact that this model doesn't scale is not news. It doesn't require rediscovery. It shouldn't be surprising. Anyone who has run Apache, sendmail, or any 80s/90s networking software -- much less authored something similar -- will know better.

Moreover, there's nothing wrong with threads -- threads are a low-level tool that can be used to implement high-level concurrent systems. They're cheaper than processes because they do support mutable state where it's useful, but you don't have to use fork() to avoid avoid mutable state.

If you don't want shared mutable state (and you don't), then don't use it.
"we decided to, for example, we significantly cut down all the snacks that had been available. [laughter]"

Sounds more like a joke to me. Are google perks like the gourmet food really being cut? (I heard about the child care changes. It sounded like a reasonable change to me but not being a Googler I wouldn't know and the details are hazy).

The head line seems sensationalistic and gives the impression that the folks at the top have made a actual decision to move more towards a "grey corporation".

I had also assumed(wrongly?) that the layoffs got rid of some dubious people who were hired. I personally know some not so great people who somehow got hired.

Do any quotes or facts bear this out? The linked article seemed hyperbolic and twisting some quotes out of proportion. I sthere any difference "on the ground"? People don't get free food now? Sounds insane!
If you want to dismiss a post on that theory, you should remove the links to your products in your profile.
Being vocal about imperfections in the development cycle and suggesting improvements that matter to the bottom line is not dissent.

It's important to have open communication about this very topic - it improves the pipeline and keeps margins where they need to be. Be confident and prepared with data, and make yourself an asset to your company, not just a keypusher! :)
..and on the seventh day, Science created zsh
Best Practices for the New Project Manager
Good and wicked cool mobile and wireless companies to watch
This meme is a silly amateur-hour wheel re-invention and ignorance of history.

Yeah, well fuck you too.

As it turns out, I am an amateur, at least when it comes to POSIX, but more importantly I find this stuff fun. I hadn't realized that having fun and learning about new topics was such an offensive thing to do.

Maybe this is just frivolity, but it's surely a better way to spend a few minutes than crapping all over somebody else's fun.
There is no need to dismiss all such posts. Some may be interesting/educational regardless.

But you do need to keep in mind the primary motivation behind them -- marketing.
So here is the issue with Android
Cheap naked chips snap a perfect picture
A few of us were discussing this today/yesterday -- in regards to whats wrong with android.

What I am wondering is -- how does Google, et. al. avoid the "Lowest Common Denominator" problem. Or are they doomed?

(My opinion? doomed as far as apps are concerned)
More and more I am realizing that ORMs will always be either flawed or a pain, because relational database technology has not kept pace with modern app programming. The solution is to do away with SQL databases in favor of object db, document db, key-value store, or whatever NoSQL solution most fits the problem domain.
It just doesn't seem that dirty to me. I've had such experiences over and over at various startups; it's just part of doing something none of you have ever done before. I especially found sickeningly familiar the part where everything seems to work fine when you try it, and when people try it in front you, but people who are somewhere else invariably run into mysterious problems that they can't seem to articulate. "Well, it's fine now that you're here, but earlier nothing worked!".
Obscura Cuelight Pool Table (the surface is not a screen)