aminuit

When you find a really good site on HN, add it to your RSS reader. Check out proggit. If you have an industry you're interested in or a problem you're trying to solve, start googling and keep track of all the interesting sites you come across. There's a wealth of good stuff out there, though it isn't going to be TC style (linkbait titles, unnecessarily effusive prose, etc).

Selection bias much? He's complaining about an over abundance of consumer facing web businesses at an event sponsored by a blog that focuses almost exclusively on consumer facing web businesses.

There is lots of real computer science going on in the world, and there's a bunch of money being thrown at it. It's just that you won't hear about any of it by reading TechCrunch all day.

Just wanted to apologize again for sniping at you yesterday. It was uncalled for. Glad to see you've been able to incorporate it into a proper discussion.

I worked at a cool little company where we built a useful product. We just built it. We didn't use waterfall, agile, or any real process. We just made sure to communicate and only hired people with good judgement and critical thinking skills. A big (very big) company decided they liked our product and bought the company.

After acquisition, our new overlords decided that our process, i.e. using our brains, wasn't compliant with whatever standards they had for development. In came the agile consultants, scrum masters, TDD, CI, etc. All the things you hear these blog posts evangelize about. It brought development to a total halt as all these assholes put in their $0.02 about how we needed scrums, sprints, user stories, and story points. Developers couldn't work on the features they knew were important without cutting through miles of red tape (finding a "customer" to make a story, breaking that story down into the actual work that needed to be done, moving the story through the backlog, estimating points for the stories, etc).

Like I said above. It ruined my software department. I wouldn't wish agile on my worst enemy.

Ever notice that virtually all Agile success stories are written by Agile consultants and not by developers? Ever notice that nobody actually claims to have built anything from scratch with Agile?

The stories all read the same. Product has already been built. Developers stuck bike shedding over some piddly detail, when lo and behold the Agile consultant arrives to cut through the Gordian knot by placing the developers on a strict regimen of myopic thinking and inattention to detail.

Agile is bullshit.

(disclaimer: Agile consultants ruined the software group I work in.)

Making good software is hard, and anyone claiming to have a magical process that guarantees good software is selling snake oil. I can appreciate your wanting to make a buck, but would also seriously appreciate it if you could find some other industry besides software development to go screw up.

FYI apt-get update does not update any packages. It just downloads the current list of packages and their versions from the repository.

In summary, hard work is hard.

I know HN is targeted towards the startup crowd, but do we constantly have to vote up these self-aggrandizing, self-congratulating posts about how it takes some kind of special breed of human to work hard for a year or two?

> This is where you hire a copywriter for your website and he or she fills the pages with cleverly crafted, delightfully delectable prose that oh-so-playfully sing and dance.

Prose is singular. The plural of prose is proses, though it's not frequently used. If you're going to chide authors on style, make sure you've got the grammar correct first. Also as a counterexample, I'd like to point out that woot.com typically exhibits playful prose to great effect. Honestly, I probably visit more for the excellent ad copy than any other reason.

Initially (or at least a couple of years ago) if you submitted a PDF, the link would only be available through Scribd. It was a topic of much discussion. See here for example: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=195431

Google is going to have to build (or outsource) a lot of what Verizon already has. He may be considering those costs when he does the per household numbers. Consider that Verizon has an army of trained field technicians, fiber trucks, call centers, easement rights, and so forth.

FYI the term 'corporate welfare' typically refers to governments giving special treatment to corporations, not corporations tolerating unproductive hangers-on.

Not in the article, but worth mentioning: Wattvision is a YC Winter 09 company.

I get where you're going, but the toaster analogy doesn't work. If you want to sell toasters (or basically anything that takes mains voltage) en masse in Western markets, you'll have to fork over several large to Underwriters Laboratories and go through their approval process.

An article about a report from the "International Boys' Schools Coalition" suggesting that all boys schools are advantageous to mixed sex schools. This is on the front page of HN?

So long and thanks for all the fish.

Yes I read your post. That's why I was able to quote from it. If you want to hire a good programmer, ask them about programming. It's that simple. Set up a few scenarios and let them talk and whiteboard their way out of it. Ideally you'll be able to come up with a range of problems that range from familiar to totally unknown. The familiar scenarios will tell you if they are bullshitters, and the unfamiliar scenarios will tell you how quickly they can adapt to new environments.

While it is true that people who program outside of work tend to be good programmers, it is not true that all good programmers program outside of work. And your note about charity work is outright insulting to anyone who has spent their free time helping those in need.

> "lame excuses like charity work"

Buzz off. How is this at the top of the front page on HN?

Also, it's idiotic to to perpetuate the "rock star programmer" meme. All the great developers I have ever known would never consider themselves rock stars, however most of the biggest assholes I've ever known did consider themselves rock stars. As a developer, I'd never work somewhere that looked for rock stars, ninjas, or what have you. It clearly shows they don't understand programmers and programming.

edit: language.

* Nobody knew where Banda Aceh was

* Barack Obama was a little known Illinois state senator

* xkcd did not exist

Unless you live or have loved ones who live anywhere near The Gulf Coast, in which case it is very much true.

Making the DNS even more unreliable isn't good for anyone. Also, you're talking about returning an IP that is probably blocked by GFW anyways. So instead of getting the web page for the "innocent (to the Chinese govt)" website, the end user just gets a TCP RST.

You run a hosted application environment. You experience an outage that affects all of your customers. Do you a) admit that you encountered a problem that sysadmins have known about since the dawn of the Internet, or b) spin it as a novel web 2.0 problem ("unknown unknown", seriously?), solvable only by your crack team of cloud computing experts?

For those of us that still host our own servers, it's a little bit frustrating to see this spun as something new. It's not. If you design services that require high uptime, you incorporate the notion of losing a datacenter, which is effectively what happened here.

There is a good point in the comments that isn't made in the article. Unlike a traffic light outage due to power failure, the ice buildup may only affect one of the signals, so the conventional rule to treat a dark traffic signal as a four way stop fails. One person may see a green light, while another driver on a perpendicular course stops at the affected light, but then enters the intersection because he expects the other driver to stop.

The expert: Jeffrey Moyer, chair of the National Organic Standards Board

He has an agenda, and his story sounds apocryphal.

The On Language column in the Times was written for about thirty years by a guy named William Safire. The column usually criticized some recent instance of language usage in popular culture. He was frequently peevish but managed to avoid coming across as acerbic. Safire died recently, and since then his column has been written by a series of guest authors. In this instance, the author is trying to recreate Safire's style and unfortunately fails miserably.

You see the same thing in the British automotive press. Everyone wants to write like Jeremy Clarkson, but nobody else can pull off his style without coming across as a total asshole.

I blame Howard Roark.

He mentions AOL and UUNET because he has worked at AOL and UUNET. The blog post is 90% strokefest and has no real point.

If you're bragging about 300ms average response times...

If you're using "spidey-sense" to determine the underperforming elements in your software stack...

There are a number of uncomfortable ideas in this article.

Do you plan to host reocities indefinitely, or is this just a stopgap measure before you can donate the collection to another organization?

The rest of this article discusses why dynamic linking does not deliver on any of its promises and why, just as communism, it might be an idea that only works in an ideal world.

He depends on that comparison because the rest of his argument is lacking.

His first example, the one about the broken C++ ABI, isn't really an argument against dynamic linking. C++ binary compatibility has always been a nightmare because different groups refuse to agree on a standard. It's a ding against C++, but not dynamic linking per se. For any solution to the problem he's trying to solve, there are going to be pathological cases that perform poorly. Poor C++ ABI standardization seems to be one of those cases for dynamic linking.

He also doesn't really consider the world before DSOs. Consider maintaining a machine (or lots of machines) where every package was statically linked against different versions of the same core libraries. What happens when a vulnerability is discovered in one of those libraries? How do you know which packages are vulnerable? Do really want to upgrade every single package on every machine if there is a libc vulnerability?

"It is probably more illuminating to go a little bit further back, to the Middle Ages. One of its characteristics was that "reasoning by analogy" was rampant; another characteristic was almost total intellectual stagnation, and we now see why the two go together. A reason for mentioning this is to point out that, by developing a keen ear for unwarranted analogies, one can detect a lot of medieval thinking today."

Edsger W. Dijkstra