skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The point is, roughly, making a protocol for browsers to communicate bi-directionally with servers (that is, either side can send data to the other at any time; this spec tries to provide semantics of a TCP socket), which (a) gets through proxies and firewalls, (b) has as little overhead as possible, and (c) has no potential security vulnerabilities not already present in other types of browser connections (XHR, etc.).

Currently, the set of techniques collectively called "Comet" are inconsistent across browsers, fragile to new browser version changes, and extremely hacky.

> The application still needs to implement yet another layer to deal with the data

Well sure, the application needs to implement the semantics of whatever the particular network app is that will communicate with a method like this. But that's always been true for any application. Something like this just tries to give web applications some of the same flexibility that applications with more access to the OS, and which could therefore just open TCP sockets, always had.
I know it sounds unreal, but check out the Washington Post article about him which I quoted in the interview. You'll see that he does more than give speeches to help people. http://bit.ly/3Ubb5B
I would hope that the White House would apply their cyber-security experts to the problem of securing Drupal and contribute their changes back to the community. ;)
On a related note, the US stockpile of h1n1 vaccine has none of these other toxic substances (adjuvants, namely squalene) this time around. Most of the rest of the world uses them, and the side effect profile is either zero or minimal, depending on whom you ask.
Not only is there no metric, but when we force artificial metrics onto programming teams, we are forcing them to pursue a goal other than the quality of the software itself. Any benefits derived from measurability will be eclipsed by the bad practices brought about by the metrics.

Take the two of the most common pseudo-metrics: lines-of-code, bugs-closed-per-month.

Lines-of-code encourages verbosity and complexity while discouraging code reuse. It also ignores essential code maintenance tasks that usually remove lines-of-code rather than adding them.

Bugs-closed-per-month encourages the creation of bugs in the first place. Not that anyone intentionally makes mistakes, but it lets the programmer get away with getting it less-right the first time. Even worse, it assures continued dividends from an error-prone implementation.

It would be useful to seek macroscopic measures of programmer productivity in our discipline as a whole. Let's just keep in mind the potential adverse effects of applying these metrics on the ground. Realistically, any effective macro metric will be abused my PHBs all over the world in managing their 10 man teams.
Because they are risk-takers. Low risk - low reward.
How to check commit comments on SVN Commit?
First Rule of Programming Is Don't Program
While us programmers tend to say "I'll just program it myself" it is actually much faster to:

- Buy an off the shelf program and take 3 hours to read their proprietary API for extra functionality.

- Use an existing library and read the documentation rather than building your own code.

- Use VB.NET or Delphi for the front-end user interface.

- Buy a properly documented royalty-free library for under $1000 rather than spend months integrating open source code.

- Use Python or VB.NET even tho it just feels right to use Java/C. (Ok, I said it. Now if I can only get this VB.NET flame shield program to finish loading.)

Unfortunately, us programmers tend not to do this. "Oh, we need a queue class? I'll just build it myself, takes like 30 minutes tops."

As coders, we need to think like an engineer who is building a car. No engineer building a car will make the engine or windshield themselves. But us coders do this all the time.

There are 2 parts to every program:
[1]: The new scientific code/algorithm you are writing. Which is typically quite small. (5%) [2] Everything else. (95%)

How many times have I got that urge.. "I don't want to do the research. I want to jump right in.. I bet I can finish this tonight.."
90% of the code out there is already written. It is more about adding the glue. And of course, finding it and reading the docs.
Many people take it as an article of faith that there is a 10x difference in productivity between the best programmers and (take your pick) either average programmers or the worst programmer in their organization. Almost no programmers, however, are compensated at 10x the compensation of the average or lowest performing member of their organization.

That's not an article of faith. It is a repeatedly measured fact. Pick up a copy of Peopleware for an explanation of how that was measured.

That said, in comparisons of programmers from different organizations the single biggest factor in determining performance was the productivity of other programmers at your organization. Part of that is that productivity is highly environment driven. Part is that good programmers like to congregate together. Either way you are very unlikely to see 10 to 1 ratios within an organization. A ratio of 3 or 4 to 1 is much more realistic. (See Software Estimation: Demystifying the Black Art by Steve McConnell for a cite.)

Going back to the theme of the article, there is another reason for high salaries, which is to provide a disincentive for bribery. You see this in an obvious way with traders. Imagine that you're bargaining over the exact price of a $10 million bond. Wouldn't you be tempted to offer $10,000 under the table to the other guy if he'll agree that the bond is worth $100,000 more? If the other guy was receiving a normal salary, wouldn't this offer be hard to resist?

However are you going to risk the outrageous salaries that traders get offered for a small bribe like that? And if you began taking bribes, you can be sure that news would get around. (If for no other reason than that traders trade that kind of valuable information around.) Which would make it hard to ever get another job at that outrageous salary.
UnHeard Radio - Rock, Metal, Hip Hop, Discover New Music - Get On The Radio
Hundreds? 48,161,019 Americans were vaccinated, 1098 cases of Guillain-Barré Syndrome (GBS) recorded nationwide by CDC surveillance, 532 of which were linked to the NIIP vaccination, resulting in death from severe pulmonary complications for 25 people

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swine_influenza#1976_U.S._outbr...
While he has a point, I don't think he's right in the specific quote he takes exception with.

Facebook needs to be more than just a place for people to swap photos and keep in touch with their mates, if they want to justify their Google-scale valuation. And Scoble wasn't advising that FB should disregard what people want to do with the system, only that they need to figure out better ways to encourage people to do things that will actually result in FB making money.

So, overall, a poorly articulated article, I think.
I'm surprised at how popular FogBugz is. Anyone here used it before/after using Trac, Redmine, BZ, or Mantis? How does it compare?
Here is an article visible if you are at a university: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18441370

In brief, this is a disease caused by an effective deficiency of a protein. It is theoretically possible to apply similar methods to other diseases of genetic deficiency. Other approaches are promising for diseases of overabundance or adverse gain of function mutations.
he makes some excellent points, or should I say hypothoses?

drop 25% of the features to reduce complexity by half. I suppose this is why templates and re-usable code appeal to managers moreso than software developers. one sees the clock and the other sees something that would be much more beautiful after a redo.

my son learned in mechanical engineering school that if you want the best design and the best device, don't ask the builder to design the device. the builder will make decisions based on the complications of the build process and the desire to build. the designer would focus on the utility of the device and defer thinking to the builder on how to get the thing built.

People with different Myers Briggs score do better in pair programming. Raise your hand if that makes your brain hurt.

Mythical Man Month is the classic book on this, based on the OS360 project at IBM.

Complexity drives time to complete toward infinity. Says the moth to the flame, "you're so beautiful". Says the teacher to the class, "let's not get ahead of ourselves".

A fellow named Francis Frank used to teach project management as a position that sits between the hydrant and the dog. The scrum master takes that role now, looking for a favorable outcome from myers briggs score diversity.

I especially like the point that defects are not a factor of geographic distance, but of distance on the org chart.
Trac. And it's not just a bug tracking. It's a great collaboration tool, especially with tags, blog and discussion plugins installed.
At my current job we have Redmine setup, I throw all my personal stuff up on BitBucket, and two previous startups I worked at used Jira and FogBugz,
running_avg
where
sum = first(input) fby sum + next(input);
n = 1 fby n + 1;
running_avg = sum / n;
end;

So if you change the name of the function, you have to change it everywhere inside its body? I'm not sure if I like that.
Is blog reading mainstream?
When you are a banker, what is the risk? Are you quietly taken out back to the shed and shot whenever you don't meet your quarterly target?

(Unemployment, you say? But that's the same risk my garbageman takes...)
Making the Grade Isn't About Race. It's About Parents.
Google Analytics data of being slashdotted and posted here.
Global economy has no substitute for falling dollar
The posted link's dated 2007 and yours is dated 2009, though, unless I'm mistaken.
Of course, "Don't PROGRAM" is a greate rule. If you can use libriry of algorithms or something else that is made by really professional programers and fulfit all your requerements it's good. To buy this library will save your time (=money).

But there are many cases when the best solution is to program. For example: Hi performance software development, sequrity issues and etc.
Not so crazy really. Samsung and other HDTV manufacturers are already starting to include a barebones PC running Windows in their television sets. I was quite skeptical of the article until the last paragraph reminded me of this. It would be a stretch for Apple but people laughed when they heard Apple was making a phone. I like Apple but still wasn't sure about them going up against the likes of Nokia, and now Nokia is scrambling to catch up. Apple has the ability to shake things up.

> Do I think this is definitely the direction Apple is moving with the iMac? Not necessarily, but its actions thus far have certainly got me thinking about it and I wouldn’t be surprised to see Apple make a strong play at the high-end of the HDTV market. In a few years you may be able to buy 30, 40 and 50 inch iMacs, at a premium over standard HDTVs, but with a lot more functionality built-in. It’s certainly Apple’s style to go into an industry and try to slice off the top 10 percent of market share, which also happens to include the lion’s share of the profits. It’s done it in computers, it’s done it with cell phones, why not with HDTVs
same as http://www.zerohedge.com/
I prefer: No code is better than no code.

Or: Programming takes eons.
The Apple Computer company, no longer in a garage, heard about my program and asked to see it. I added some things to it, made it presentable and stuffed it into a big manila envelope. As I rode my bike to the post office I thought, Who knows, maybe they'll like my program. It might be worth hundreds of dollars.

That doesn't even sound like the same field. I love it.
Used Trac before FogBugz.

I like Trac better. It has a more intuitive interface, and with the various plugins you can argue it does way more.
Yes. Though I guess you could always wrap it up.
If you read the Atlantic article, the CDC believes vaccines to be so effective in the elderly that it would be immoral to do a randomized controlled trial.

You can also see statements like this: http://www.cdc.gov/FLU/protect/keyfacts.htm

The single best way to protect against the flu is to get vaccinated each year.

More frequently washing your hands is more effective against influenza then vaccination.

The purpose of vaccination is not necessarily to save lives- it is most often given to healthy individuals who are not at any kind of risk of death- it is so they can avoid getting sick.

The life-saving claims for the elderly simply haven't been scientifically demonstrated, as the Cochrane review referenced by the Atlantic article points out- studies are below:

doi:10.1002/14651858.CD004876.pub2
doi:10.1093/ije/dyi274
In Java, you usually do not invent the wheel but rather take an existing open-source jar.

Even those of them that aren't very good, sadly. But most are.
With streams in Haskel, did you mean lazy lists? Or is there something else, I've missed so far?
Not programming is hard work. You will spend about 90% of your programming time integrating other software whether you like or not.

By the way, the nr 1 rule is: context is everything. The nr 2 rule is: keep it simple.
You are quite right, thanks for the correction. However, note that the actual total will always be higher then that which the authorities have officially verified. I will also quote the very next sentence on that Wikipedia article:

... the vaccine killed more Americans than the disease did
A critique of the Atlantic Magazine article, Does the Vaccine Matter?
The title is completely inaccurate.
"keep it simple" is really good rule. But "Don't program" is good too. As i can see, many people try to code many complicated library methods even don'tknow about methods.
I'm not sure how a type system can protect against accounting errors, and I'm even less sure how the type system would know what accounting rules to apply without human input.
Was thinking about this yesterday, when I realised that with an EyeTV the 27" iMac would be larger and have more features than our current LCD TV and DVD playing/hard disk recording device, and look neater too.

Also when I compared it to a colleague spending most of a thousand UK pounds on a 32" Samsung TV with a media player, ethernet port, basic web browser and USB ports in it, even at the current price the basic 27" is not terribly far away from that.

They could be a good TV now with the right TV Tuner and good software.
I'm not sure your definition of high-performance software development and mine coincide here, in any sense imaginable.

In the programmer-performance sense, just snagging an off-the-shelf component and shoehorning it into your product will let you ship something far sooner than otherwise. Who cares if the code looks nice right now? Just ship the damn thing!

In the runtime-performance sense, the whole mess becomes a case of "someone else's problem." If you purchase a component, I'd say you have a lot of leverage to complain that a particular piece of software isn't performant or secure. If it's open source, write patches and, if politics becomes a problem, step on someone's toes.
Programming is still a craft. If you want to know how it should be done, just look at the masters. Plenty of successful products out there that can serve as an example.

Until we develop actual computer science (rather than calling publicly funded engineering science) that's all we have.
Latest transponder update 10-25-2009 | fastsatfinder.com
Satellite transponders in INI format for: ProgDVB, FastSatfinder, DreamBox... and more transponders sorted by satellites and regions
I ment runtime-performance.

Off-the-shelf components will make you to code fatster and prolly much more flexible.
Don't programm is really greate rule.

Don't programm and keep your code as simple as possible
As an odd corollary, in matters of system administration, the exact opposite is usually apposite: AUTOMATE EVERYTHING.
That is a whole lot of hand-waving mixed with name-calling to counteract the "story" of the Atlantic article. It basically agrees with the conclusions at the heart of the matter, though, that vaccination has not been proven in the elderly. However the blog seems pro vaccination for those under 50, unlike the Atlantic article.
Ask HN: Anyone want to sightsee around the valley on Monday?
I'm in town for Startup School and plan on siteseeing around the Silicon Valley area tomorrow, Monday. I don't have any specific targets in mind, though I'll probably check out Mountain View, Palo Alto, etc.

If you're in town and want to tag along, I'd love to have the company. I can pick you up if you need it. I have room for 4 others in my rental car.

For those familiar with the area: what spots do you recommend checking out?
That picture of an abandonment remains could be used as an epilogue to entire soviet era.

Almost everything was spoiled and ruined in past 20 years.
It's kind of the same rule. AUTOMATE EVERETHING == Let something or someone todo your work == Use work of another people == use library == DON'T PROGRAM
Well, let's keep things in perspective. We're talking about the ethics of asking some 1000 volunteers _not_ to get a flu jab in one winter. ([edit] not about nazi death camps as the article you posted does)

And I think it is ridiculously un-ethical to vaccinate hundereds of millions of people with a vaccine that has never been tested properly (and I mean the seasonal flu, not the exceptional swine flu situation). These people go out and take risks that may cost them their lives because they have a false sense of safety.
Often - actually, almost always - third-party code is too general for the task at hand. If the job you're doing is simple, it can cost less in cognitive complexity to implement it directly, particularly if it's a problem domain you're expert in.

But when integrating, I do prefer to wrap the integrated thing within a simple layer or wrapper, if feasible, that only exposes what I need. That buys me several things: it makes the interface very simple; I can create tests that verify my expectations; I can replace it later without having to clone someone else's API; and the API of the wrapper is almost a bullet-point list for what I'm expecting the third-party code to provide, and as I dispatch from the wrapper to the third-party code, I can verify that it's going to meet my requirements, before having to readjust architecture etc. if I find out it doesn't fit further down the road.
Ok - this is a cute post but I'm going to play devil's advocate.

So what if it is faster to do X? I program because I like to. I find it much better than trawling through the net, evaluating a half-dozen alternatives and then cursing as I try to force fit their API into my requirements.
Usually the process of automating is writing high-level glue code. So it is a kind of combination; it's using third-party code, but it's also very much programming.
So why did you switch to FogBugz?
I remember it as, "You need to have a liquidity event to have a 'liquidity event.'"
If you like you may programm but it will be your HOBBY. IF you need something special or it is fater to program yourself DO IT.
But Biz needs fast and quility solution.

however i'm in Academia and need to program a lot of by myself, cause i should use some non free library ( cause other people wil lnotbe able to modefy this code and etc.
Why JVM while there is LLVM?

btw, is there any work-in-progress implementations of arc using llvm?
You subscribe to the rose-colored glasses version. :) I'm sensing a trust issue or two w/r code written by others, but that's okay.

In reality, while you'd like to keep your code as simple as possible, it's often impossible even to keep the simplest things simple because you have numerous bad designs from the past to use as a foundation for whatever it is you're building.

UNIX? Sucks.
X11? Sucks.
Windows NT? Sucks.
Win32? Sucks.
.NET? Sucks.
PHP? Sucks.
Perl? Sucks.
Ruby? Sucks.
Everything? Sucks.

Any one of these will pose a decent enough challenge somewhere down the line. What really becomes a problem, though, is gluing a good chunk of that mess together somehow.

Get your product out now and then worry about runtime performance.

If that ends up being a big concern early on anyway, I suppose you could pull a Google and just hype the hell out of your product while letting in a small amount of early adopters. ;)
That's generally the way recursion works too. Do you have similar issues with it?

IDEs have largely made this a solved problem anyway.
Against storage infrastructure complexity
Yup it is. You know the main idea of all this advices is Try to save your time and power. For administrators: Write code thatwill do your job.
For programmers: find someone who have done this work with needed quolity
Each line of code is a liability. Even tests.

Eventually, something will happen to render that line of code incorrect; either another line of code, changes to other code, changes in the tech stack or 3rd party libraries, and even the domain may change out from under your code.
Yup it is mix.
You know, Life has alot of compromizes
I'm just going to repeat it until every programmer in the world gets it: context is everything.
Yup it is mix. You know, Life has alot of compromizes
Good investment for a tech guy?
I'm a web developer, and managed to make about $200k after tax on a project. I want to invest this in a healthy way, currently it is a mix of stocks and a 2% interest bank account. I'm looking to diversify more, and shift more away from the bank deposit.

I've been thinking about buying an apartment to rent out, since it would be less risk than stocks, but better than a bank account (seems you could conceivably make around 4% per year on one). But it seems a bit silly, I would have to deal with renters and issues with the apartment, which is not my core skill. I am a developer, isn't there some sort of investment more suitable for me?

I could imagine for example buying existing web sites that have proven ad revenue, assuming there are some owners that are risk-averse enough to sell. Or, what other options are there?
The Computer History Museum is pretty cool.

If you know someone at Google, Cisco or any other big ones see if you can tag a tour around with them.

Lick Observatory in the mountains to the east, awesome drive up http://tinyurl.com/130crazyroad.
we're in the same boat! too bad they raised the price from 10 to 15/month. cash flow is difficult as is :(
Apple's right off the De Anza exit from 280. The main apple building is pretty cool, a perennial geek photo op, and there's an Apple store that sells T-shirts and other merch.

There's a decent Muslim Chinese place within walking distance on Stevens Creek, and I like Gochi Japanese Tapas on Homestead.

There's a Fry's in between Cupertino and Palo Alto, on Sunnyvale. If you don't have a Fry's where you live, it's worth visiting, even if it is a generally horrible place to shop.

I cannot fucking stand Palo Alto as a community, but Stanford campus is fun to wander around.

Generally, you should try to get out of South Bay as quickly as you can; either go west, to Half Moon Bay and then down to Monterey (stop at any beach), or into the city. I liked Zeitgeist, the bar, when I lived there --- it's on 14th and Valencia --- but it may suck now.
Same here, using TFS at work. I don't have a problem with it at all, but that could be from my lack of exposure to other products.
Thanks -- I suppose I'm more interested in seeing businesses. For example, does Google offer tours of the Googleplex?
Great advice. Otherwise, you might learn something. By doing. Which is so passé.

Why is this site called 'Hacker News' anyway?
Seasonal flu kills approximately 36,000 _Americans_ annually. Confirmed deaths worldwide for the 2009 H1N1 flu: 5,382

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_flu_pandemic
#1 Rule of Programming Is..There is no Rule #1
So the vaccine was effective in preventing the disease?