skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I suspect we are in "Violent Agreement". I also believe the chances of finding, say, a good enough Scala programmer to fix this software that has a problem are actually higher than the chances of finding a good enough C++ programmer to fix this other software that has a problem.

I have no evidence, the reasoning is outlined in my other comment. I suspect we agree on all major points, and that things should be better than they are.
Maybe, if developers didn't riot in the streets. I can't imagine Apple would want to remove it, though. They probably leaned on it a lot for the various optimizations they did during the snow leopard development cycle. A huge chunk of what Instruments.app does is dtrace filters under the hood, too.
The poll feature is, I think, intentionally vague as a soft-firewall to having a shed load posted (I wont post a link just in case that is the theory; it's not hard to work out though). THere is a karma threshold but I am not sure what it is.

There arent too many guidelines on how to quote. I usually use italics and others use >.

Formatting guides exist on this help page: http://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc (it's linked too next to most text boxes but sometimes not hugely noticeable)

(I dont know if your asking to find out about these things or requesting additional help pages; either way at least the questions are answered for others :))
I've been using Unfuddle for all of my projects for a few years. We have a few projects and around 10 users. Works wonders.
Legal highs
purchasing Herbal Incense products you agree not to ingest, smoke, imbibe or consume these products and that you intend to use these products only for use as a non burning aromatic potpourri. The purchase of any product sold on this web site is the personal liability of the person or company who has placed and who has received the order and not the liability of www.charlie-boy.com
I've made this same point a couple of times before on here: generally I think Caffeine is just a poor stimulant full stop and there are much more productive and "healthy" ones/methods that leave you feeling a lot better

Good to see some agreement/support on this :D
What's the bug tracking like in GitHub? Considering using it for source control - and if it's fully integrated with bug tracking that would be a real bonus.
Three effective tips to get started with conversion rate optimization
WWII codebreaker worried about sleep-talking
I managed to guess it (poll url) though!
thanks anyway
Why not use something like www.postrank.com? I'm pretty sure that's why it was made, to solve the problem of reducing all the noise and only showing you the best content.
lighthouse ( http://www.lighthouseapp.com )
Gene Therapy Helps Blind Children See
It would appear to me if you ever hit the failure mode of needing a C++ programmer within the hour, to fix a completely unknown codebase. It very much seems to me like you have already lost.

As far as I have seen the verification and testing process before deployment, takes on the order of a months. Let alone how long it takes to really understand a codebase, and the potential ramifications of a change. Also it is not like you can hire any C++ programmer, you need someone versed in the subset and style that is used in these safety critical areas.

Seems like you are optimizing for something that isn't really an issue, and if it ever becomes an issue you are likely to have much bigger problems. If you lose the people with all your domain knowledge, and understanding of how it is build and why. I would argue that language is the least of your issues.
The productivity tracking he's talking about sounds like the Pomodoro technique. Check here for more: http://www.pomodorotechnique.com/
Jira, with about 500 developers. It is quite slow with this many developers. Apparently Atlassian has developed their own database query engine, and use the database only as simple storage. This makes it very hard to optimize for our internal developers. (Note: I know very little about the details - just that it is slow)
Same. Please add unfuddle to the options. A lot of people use it.
Does the New iMac Foretell the Next Apple TV?
Both of your questions are answered in the FAQ: http://ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
The difference between a good and great banker is billions of dollars, stupid. Why not give them what they earn. You know the commandment from God, "Do not covet thy neighbor's goods." What's it to you.

A person will be happy about a raise unless they find-out a coworker got a bigger one. It's human nature and petty.

If the poor are getting better off, hypothetically, what relecance is the rich people's increase?

It's like racial achievement gaps. If minorities scores are increasing, what relevance is an achievement gap? Would it be better to make whites stupider?
>I DO know quite well what I'm NOT interested in though. Very few solutions let me filter out crap I'm NOT interested in.

Yes, you know what you're not interested in. But can you express that in a machinable fashion? " http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_it_when_I_see_it " only helps you after you've already seen it.

Alternately, if you could create the machine to take a human's loose description of what they're not interested in and filter it out, there are any number of ways to turn that into big money AND big benefit to society. (In very loose terms, that's what search engines do...)
I second this one but would recommend learning Javascript by using Greasemonkey and the introductory guide "Dive Into Greasemonkey" which was discussed here recently http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=897706.

Greasemonkey lets you make changes to websites by writing small programs and it is fairly easy to find problems around the web to fix.

Example problem to solve: Hide posts on Hacker News from blogs that you already read elsewhere or that you don't like.
At work, we use TeamTrack - I wouldn't recommend it, it has a pretty horrible interface.

Previously I used FogBugz, which was a joy to use, how I miss it now!
Hackers target Guardian jobs site
Also http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/10/24/startup-school-an-inter...
well, I should have looked at there first, faq me!
I am sure some HR department somewhere has quantified this. If x Lisp programmers can do the work of y Blub programmers where x << y, and the difficulty of hiring one Blub programmer is p, and the salary of a Blub programmer s, what value of z in (pz, sz)makes it worthwhile changing languages?

The last company I worked for did exactly the same thing. Every major release, would would provide a detailed set of instructions, the code, the exact kit list, etc to run up our app and give it to the auditors. Not sure how much use this actually was; our customers already had running systems, and the knowledge of the problem domain was what they were paying us for, not that we were really good at typing into Emacs. And it took us who knew the codebase well 6-12 months to get a programmer to the point at which they could be truly useful with it. But at least, if it had all gone hatstand, someone might have had a fighting chance. Or one of our customers could have just hired us directly and we'd have kept working on it ;-)
Move at a Pace You Can Sustain
Reversing Aging: Interview with Aubrey de Grey, CSO of SENS Foundation
I apologize for being...Microsofty...but I use (and am the author of) BugTracker.NET. It's a free and open source bug tracking app for ASP.NET. In style and philosophy, it's closest to FogBugz.

This weekend I just finished getting the git and mercurial integration working. My eyes hurt.

More info about BugTracker.NET at http://ifdefined.com/bugtrackernet.html.
I wouldn't send this fellow out on sales calls with my customers. He makes a good point that he ought to apply to himself.
I use retrospectiva: http://retrospectiva.org/overview. It's a trac-like written in Ruby on Rails, but with multi-projects and git support. And I personnaly find that retrospectiva looks nicer than trac. The AgilePM extension is a also a great plus for us.

EDIT: We are a team of 8 people using it, 2-4 per project.
He also wrote GraForth (an implementation of Forth with animation and sound for 1Mhz Apple ][+), one of the most amazing pieces of software I've ever seen.
PokerStars European Poker Tour Warsaw Day 4: Luca Pagano ...
World’s First BitTorrent Powered Live Streamed Concert
We love Unfuddle! Not too complicated, no too simple. Pleasantly integrated.
So, what did happen to the CrunchPad?
Real-time event chat startup Hot Potato raises $1M
The author stated (in the Comments section) he doesn't use it per se but he does indicate he borrows from it:

Re: Pomodoro technique

I don’t use the pomodoro technique as written, however I was tracking 60 minute periods and switched to 25 minutes after reading that this was the ‘best practice’ discovered by the pomodoro people.
Emily Howell, the virtual composer making waves in the computer world
BugTracker.NET
I added it in the list too :)

It's always interesting to see the writers of these tools "in person"! Thanks for posting.
The only time I drank coffee in the last 4 yrs has been after my wife had an apendectamy and I went from work, to hospital, to work no sleep.

Coffee gives me about 15-20 minutes high, then its a crash mid-work so need more coffee. I never concentrate better and if I'm sleepy I remain sleepy but hyper.

I wake up perfectly fine without it. It is the routine that wakes you up not the coffee.

Also it tastes like shit.
Well..

I use BitBucket. It's not the best per-se but as I almost exclusively use Mercurial and host on Bit Bucket it makes sense.

I am not sure I would recommend it for serious projects; the hosting is stellar (and hg rocks as SCM :D) but if you have the time to integrate with Lighthouse or other such apps it's probably worth it.
Yelling no virtue is. Learning to breathe you have.
Strait coffee might be good for you. Starbucks style 800 calorie drinks use coffee is probably bad for you.
In a time long past, I found that coffee could take the place of a meal.

This probably doesn't actually work. But it still saved me the time of making a meal.
Kicking off the discussion because I'd like to know what people think:

Clojure uses streams and I imagine Haskell does too. This is a bit different though, I guess.
Some bankers make a lot of money for the same reason some football players and CEO's make a lot of money. If you have a lot of money to invest you don't don't need 50 people looking at your money. But, you want "the best" because finance is something of a zero sum game. So you bid up.

Another option is to use leverage to take huge risks with other peoples money. When a billionaire bankrolls you to bet in Las Vegas and you get to keep 20% of the winnings plus a transaction fee, and they keep all the downside you could make a tun of money. The secret is being good enough at math where it's no obvious that this is what you are doing.

The other way finance people make a lot of money is the high end watch maker concept where it's profitable to sell to rich people if you know how. The might not get better returns than a well managed 401K but there is someone on the other end of the phone to yell at when the stock goes down. Mix in some confirmation bias and it's hard for people to notice when they are getting fleeced.

PS: Another limiting factor is the number of people with the right pedigree. There is only so many people that graduate the top of their class from MIT, Harvard etc. Or who have a long history of flipping a large number of heads.
sublet. or find a non-professional landlord. look around on craigslist. there's plenty of people in trouble trying to get out of their lease.

Of course, I've not lived in the city proper, but I've lived in the bay area on and off for most of my adult life, and I've not had any trouble avoiding the corporate landlords who have funny rules.

My experience has been that the non-professionals usually have better prices, too.
It also has the added benefit of letting you see (and prioritize) bugs and features in the same place.
I have built my own. It took about 4 hours to build a workable first draft with all those free Rails plugins available. Now I customize it bit by bit whenever there is a need.
No. A 40-inch iMac is almost certainly not in the cards. The display input is an awesome idea, but mainly because displays are typically longer-lived than the rest of the computer. I can see a lot of people buying a 27" iMac and then, in 2-3 years, buying a Mac Pro and plugging it into their existing iMac for the screen.
Escape from Elm Street games
Walk around this scary dark house explore different rooms bathroom bedroom kitchen to find clues and a way out.
> The other way finance people make a lot of money is the high end watch maker concept where it's profitable to sell to rich people if you know how.

"How to Sell a $35,000 Watch in a Recession"

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=720719
Well, touche, but that much tea could last a while. A couple ounces of tea is like a couple cases (not bottles) of wine, several pounds of coffee beans, etc. I'm not sure exactly how long 4 oz. of tea would last (my wife and I rotate through a couple different teas), but probably several weeks.

Good tea is cheap, you typically just mail-order a good quantity at a time and keep it in an airtight tin. The samplers from Adagio are ~1 oz., and a great way to try out several for a few dollars each.
Are you richer than Jesus? Jesus had no where to lay His head. The poor today have technologies and goods that kings never imagined. STFU, whiners. Trust me -- money isn't wealth.
Review of Iain M. Banks' new book Transition
We use our own tracker at http://www.timmyontime.com . Actually, this is not a bug tracking app but a project monitoring one. We have a concept of "notes" and they can be anything you want : bugs, todos, ideas, etc. With that app, a bug becomes a task and you can do time-tracking on that task or comment on it.
With new plugins for MantisBT 1.2, there is well-integrated support for Subversion (WebSVN or SourceForge), Git (Gitweb or Github), and potentially any other source control system once a simple plugin is written for it.

See: http://leetcode.net/blog/2009/01/integrating-git-svn-with-ma...
What we actually know about software development, and why we believe it’s true
Outsider Intelligence
It's pretty simple/minimalistic. Here's their summary...

* Deal with your issues just like you deal with email (fast, JavaScript interface)
* Create and apply labels to issues to assign to users or categorize
* Drag and drop issues to prioritize them
* Vote on issues that you want to see tackled
* Search, sort, and filter
* Close issues from commit messages
* Keyboard shortcuts

...from their blog post about it: http://github.com/blog/411-github-issue-tracker . It's also got a screencast there. If you'd like to see what it looks like from a user's perspective, here's the issue tracker for the issue tracker: http://github.com/defunkt/github-issues/issues :P
i don't understand why people think it's impossible to grok languages on first glance. even if that were the case, having more languages under your belt (especially non-similar languages) makes the next languages you learn that much easier
I can assure you that ASP.NET MVC has its share of copied features. And you know what? That's a good thing. Good ideas should be copied and propagated, and mixed in with whatever makes the next platform unique.
wes kind of ran down using Bugzilla; too much email noise.
Now we keep a text file, review occasionally.
Works for 12-person company, 6 developers.
I implemented a dataflow language a few years ago, for data binding scenarios in a web application.

In a record-oriented data entry and validation heavy application domain, finance sector, insurance policy records, that kind of thing, an imperative approach to updating the user view gets messy pretty quickly. Using a dataflow approach, the client could receive minimal incremental updates from the server in response to events the client sent to the server, such as filling in a field or selecting a value from a drop-down. Because the structure of the UI was declarative, forms could be both pre-populated on download and incrementally updated (with AJAX) using the same set of definitions, rather than ad-hoc cooperation between either end.

Dataflow is trivially parallelizable in so far as it's not difficult to find things to parallelize; selecting an appropriately sized unit of work is somewhat trickier though.
Not every problem requires a super-latented programmer. Need a product rebuilt with a hard-coded parameter change ? Your marketing guy won't be able to do it; most any C++ programmer can fumble thru.
Turn it on its head: how many times have you been bitten by wanting to change a subsystem slightly, that you are NOT familiar with? In a hurry? Wishing all the time it had written in YOUR favorite paradigm instead of the foolish choice of whomever authored it?
We use RT http://bestpractical.com/rt/ have about 60 internal users.
"Getting it" may be right for us (developers) but wrong for the company.
A florist that needs order tracking isn't trying to change the software world. That persuasive guy thats insists SmallTalk is gods gift to florists is NOT doing them a favor.
Looks like they have a lot of open issues on the issue tracker ;)
I remember (way) back when going from C to C++. It took 8 weeks of sweat, deleting code (Bad Joe! Not OO!) and rethinking it, before my brain switched enough synapses and I was in the groove. And 10,000 hours of object-oriented design practice to be able to say constructive things about others' designs.
FogBugz, with under a dozen users.

I find it a bit frustrating (missing features; Unix compatibility issues), but the user interface was easier for our non-technical staff to learn than was the interface for RT, which was our initial choice.
I cannot recommend 'The Long Way' by Bernard Moitessier & 'The Strange Last Voyage of Donald Crowhurst' highly enough. Both books cover how 2 contestants in the Sunday Times Golden Globe Race could have won but did not, for rather interesting/different reasons.

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

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

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Crowhurst
Great advice!
DropBox could use some of this. I was initially confused and rejected DropBox because I misinterpreted their download links. I only dwelt 2.7 seconds before hitting Back, but I suppose I'm somewhere in the middle of the bell curve on that.
Paul Buchheit: Been at your job too long? QUIT
Sequoia Capital: The economy’s not so grim after all
Been using Trac for a while, then we switched to Redmine (mainly because we're a Rails shop). Both are ok.

I was eyeing youtrack the other day (http://www.jetbrains.com/youtrack/index.html), looks pretty nice, and at 150$ for 20 users it's pretty cheap.
I have to point out, it is a great domain name.
Lifter: Converts XLS files on the Web into XML
Are there any negatives to getting the flu shot? For me, if there's a chance that it could prevent me getting the flu, and there are no potential negatives, then at least I may be prevented from certain strains.
It is particularly interesting to read this essay again after reading Coders at Work in which the serious and respected practitioners of our craft support many of the arguments made here. In particular, one that I have myself been guilty of is that "once the proper way of communicating with the machines had been found, all programming ills would have been cured". This is underscored by the interviews in Coders at Work.
One shot of gene therapy and children with congenital blindness can now see
DevTrack, with somewhere on the order of 100 users. I really have no idea how well it would work in a small startup environment.

I'm not crazy about it, but I've never met an issue tracking system I am crazy about. DevTrack can be configured pretty well to suit our workflow, but I still run up against inscrutable problems sometimes. This may be due in part to the configuration, but it says something that we're still having problems with that.
;) How many "innocent" hurried changes have you seen blow up in production.

I agree with what your saying, just don't know how applicable it is to the class of software we are discussing.
Must have been a great talk, because even the slides are good (and normally the slides are almost useless alone).
Someone who is like Data in real life
In my experience, there is a strong positive correlation between people in an organization that are empowered to write checks on the company account, and their wealth. Cause and effect I cannot attest to.
2011 Lexus LFA - Lexus LFA supercar at Tokyo
Stupid Flanders.
Because banks make a lot of money?

Banks probably pay higher because the kind of people attracted to wealth are the kind of people motivated by wealth and in turn these people become managers and hire other people purely with wealth.
Hit testing for arbitrary paths on the iPhone
Overseas Chinese return to start companies
Beware of VC Seagulls, who shit on you and then fly away
Love the leather seats!
I think filtering the candidates for a C++ position by their knowledge of non-mainstream languages would probably result in a much better candidates set.

Also, its not clear that C++ is absolutely the wrong choice. You must also consider the fact that our field has its share of brilliant butterflies that are "above average in interest" for sure, but not necessarily in "ability".
I'm surprised that nobody here has yet mentioned Yerba Matte.

I've never seen any studies or anything, just going on what I felt like my experience was, but it seems like all the benefits of coffee (altertness) with none of the bad side effects (jittery, crashing, etc.)
And why fly unmanned missions? Its often said "You couln't find anyone willing to fly that thing" but of course for the priviledge of flying into history, any number of volunteers could always be found. Imagine the inspiring example, the publicity! Even with an occasional spectacular failure, folks will line up for that.
Modern institutions quash this impulse for adventure and glory. A nation that used to revel in riding-a-barrel-over-Niagara now makes it illegal. Is it a strange twist of modern psychology/PC?
Agreed, but there is a reason why every masters program out there has a survey course were students each spend a class teaching a topic to other students.

There is a lot of value in knowing what is going on in your field.
I'd love to get some suggestions on what you think would make it a better tracker!
very. There are some extremely good programmers who make a living by being available at a moments notice to fix critical bugs.

If you have a variable introducing a $0.0001 accounting error into some bank software it doesn't take long for that to stack up. If said bank delays for even a few hours in rushing a fix they could be screwed (note: this happens a surprising amount). I suspect ATC requires a lot less critical fixing but there are parallels.

You pay a guy $1000 an hour to shore it up in 2. Then employ a contractor to build and test a proper fix for next month.

I would like to point out Im not disagreeing with Rider at all :)
Silicon Valley Office Vacancy Rate over 19%
When I was working in an office all day I was so bored out my skull I'd go and make a coffee for something to do that wasn't sitting at my desk. Result was drinking lots of coffee. I switched to drinking hot squash (ie fruit cordial mixed with hot water) and spiced teas without too much problem - few days of headaches.

I'm thinking I need to cut back again but at the moment it's the chocolate I'm craving, probably again for the caffeine but also for the sugar.
English is a language, a tool for communication. What he wrote is perfectly understandable by any reasonably intelligent individual who is fluent in English. I'm sorry if his English proficiency is not up to your standards, but I assure you that it is far better than your Flemish, or French, or probably any other language than English, which happens to be the one you learned as a child.