ecuzzillo

iOS having a mission-critical bug is like a plane crash: a rare failure of a service we think of as working flawlessly every time, which we can do almost nothing to fix except hope the powers that be do it soon.

Android having a mission-critical bug is like a car crash: relatively unlikely for any given device, but there are so many devices running around that you'd be surprised if there weren't one happening somewhere all the time. And the collection of devices was never billed as just-working every time anyway.

(I have an Android phone and an iPad, and will be first in line for a Verizon iPhone.)

'Move fast and break things' apparently applies to finance as well as programming.

I meant mainly grad students and the like on their projects, not languages for classes. Languages used for classes are mostly the professor either picking his favorite language for the course (very random) or letting his TAs pick the language (very random if the TAs are not his grad students, mildly correlated with the field if the TAs are his grad students).

Edit: Initially I was talking about undergrad classes, but then realized you might have meant grad classes, so I changed it to say classes in general, which I believe is still true.

Edit 2: I set the delay so I can edit my post a bunch of times after I post it and not provide a moving target.

Edit 3: Clearly you are an exception, but then again you're reading Hacker News.

Edit 4: Where are you going to grad school that doesn't let you pick your own language?

I liked the idea of categorizing things using Starcraft, but this didn't particularly resonate for me. In particular:

a) Shiny math and shiny languages are negatively correlated; the mathier a grad student is, the more likely he is to use Matlab and the less likely he is to actually know how to program. When mathier people write non-Matlab code, it is often (but obviously not always) very shitty. Now, there are ML people, but they're a small subset of mathy programmers.

b) The "Terran" description is closest to what you would think of as a normal hacker, but hackers generally care that what they make is good, and people who care about code being good are not usually characterized as "just getting shit done," since for example they rewrite code that works just because it's ugly.

c) Terrans, by which I mean hackers, can and do learn math and then become unstoppable. I imagine there's some Starcraft parallel here, but I haven't played it recently enough.

At some point, you have to acknowledge that you lost. It's much better to do that than to force people to work on something that everybody knows lost, or at least is worse than the competition. That's what 'follow-through' amounts to. One way that Google is still even vaguely an acceptable place to work is that it allows a fair amount of freedom about what to work on, and nobody good wants to work on something that clearly lost.

Also, it's unclear that success is measured by direct profit from that project. For example, the world with Android is clearly much more promising for Google's continued revenue growth than one without Android. Mainly, Google is the only company with the software chops to write and maintain iPhone-clone software that even vaguely works and the cash and testicles to negotiate with carriers. If Google didn't continue to bang hard on Android, all the non-iPhone smartphones would suck fairly seriously, and Apple would probably cut pretty seriously into Google's ad profits, despite Apple's ads not being as effective, purely because Apple controlled the dominant smartphone platform. Apple might also have a much stronger influence over the tablet web experience, beyond than just having written the first tablet web browser that worked.

(Disclaimer: I like iOS better than Android, having owned both.)

Startups have larger variance. So, if you're unlucky, you have a possibility of doing much worse than average, as with for example child porn man.

So the key is then, presumably, to somehow try to make sure you get one on the correct end of the spectrum. Starting one yourself probably helps with this.

The remediation would be to leave the restaurant that lets customers demand more salt, and get a job at a restaurant where salt is applied correctly and customers can take it or leave it.

In other words, if you're good at programming, why are you in the custom software business instead of something more scalable?

You can order a filet for a fairly predictable price, it will take a fairly predictable amount of time, and it will fairly predictably make you happy.

Software, by and large, does not make people happy or do what they want nearly as reliably as steak does, and so if I were them I would be much more finicky about paying people to make it for me than I am about paying people to make me steak.

And especially, software made to order has even lower mean and even higher variance than most of the software that people use. And you don't know what you're getting until you get it, at which point the incompetent software vendor is demanding some ridiculously exorbitant sum for something it turned out you didn't want anyway.

You personally may not suck at programming, but the majority of programmers do, and so people are very justifiably unwilling to cough up the dough programmers demand.

On the other hand, if you were to think of the kind of people in each country who wouldn't have any friends at all in the other country, wouldn't they probably live around there?

Disclaimer: I miss Lisp too, and have noticed myself wishing I could define new syntactic constructs in Python.

That being said, there is something of a difference between hating Perl and saying that Lisp loses because it's too good and you have to be too smart to understand it. In short, Perl fundamentally sucks in ways that impact your life in big ways on a day-to-day basis. Python does have its problems, and it sucks in some respects, but I would claim that it doesn't reach nearly the level of fundamental suckage on an absolute scale that Perl does.

And, moreover, while Lisp fails to suck in certain ways that Python sucks, it ruins your life in other ways that Python doesn't. For example, I use lots of numpy/scipy/matlab/what-have-you style code. I also use lots of Cairo/GTK. In Python, all the stupid crap to take care of doing that in a Python-idiomatic way has been done already; it's known as pygtk and pycairo, and it's available in every package manager I care about.

In Lisp, all that stupid crap has not been done, or if someone has tried, they have not achieved remotely the level of polish of the Python version. So if I want to use Lisp, I have to spend a pretty big quantity of time becoming the maintainer of the equivalents of pygtk, pycairo, etc., and at least last I checked, the amount of crap and slowdown involved there was much greater than the amount of crap and slowdown that resulted from Python's various sucky bits (slowness, lack of threading, lack of macros, shitty lambdas).

And, moreover, Lisp's lack of syntax is a big win in some kinds of code, but in other kinds of code, it's pretty horrible; for example, with Numpy, I can say

myarray[where(other_array > 0)] = foo(bar(5))

or

myarray[:, baz(bum(4)):baz(bum(5))][bum(baz(6)):, :]

and that's going to be several times more succinct than writing my own slicing code and then having to say 'aref' or equivalent for each node in the syntax tree where there's some array indexing going on. In other words, syntax makes the common case fast for some very key common cases.

So saying that a key part of why Lisp fails is because it's too good and people have to be too smart to understand it is mischaracterizing people who decide to use Python because they don't want to deal with the library problems and lack of common-case syntactic convenience.

(I'm not wedded to being one of the latter people, but I do think that there are some strong points in that direction.)

It was a random sample of the batch.

Also, more humorously, "said this" becomes "spoke of this" when you're talking about Steve.

a) I thought the whole AAA thing had been found to be bankrupt? (Honest confusion.)

b) How many companies who turn down seemingly-huge acquisition offers turn out later to be 'just' whatever they were doing at the time of the offer? Most startups at any stage don't stay fixed at doing 'just' whatever they're doing at that stage.

Honest question: How many companies have had multi-billion dollar acquisition offers from large public companies and then NOT gone on to have valuations much higher than the offer? Obviously the ones off the top of my head-- Google, Facebook, whatever-- could be entirely survivorship bias.

Even so, my instinct when reading this article is that Google was stupid not to double their offer, assuming they were going to be competent enough not to ruin Groupon once they bought it.

Would you rather read another rallying cry about WikiLeaks?

If they started using a text classifier instead of their brains to decide who to interview, they would be a) stupid and b) quickly out of money.

a) and b) seem both overpoweringly unlikely, so I think more likely is that they'll just look at the results to see if there's anything interesting about them. (Wouldn't you like to see the results, just to see them? I would, and I have no intention of applying to YC anytime soon.)

Initially I didn't understand why one would think they would be so stupid, and then I remembered what almost every other entity that receives applications is like.

Like I said in the other branch: in general, it sucks to talk about talking, especially when it's always the same stuff being said. So even if it seems kind of off-topic, it's often better to stay mum for this reason.

That said, this seems more than kind of, and is the type of off-topic that seems to lead to more of the not interesting stuff, so I decided to say something despite all that.

In general, it's true that excess meta-discussion is boring and annoying, and I haven't participated in very many meta-discussions since my HN-reddit-noob period. At some point, though, when things pass a threshold, I believe it's okay to say something.

Moreover, I believe that while this thread is not on the topic of the post, it is at least somewhat interesting topic to talk about, and is unlikely to be discussed elsewhere.

For this reason, I don't think it would be better for us to communicate privately, and feel fortunate that it never occurred to me to put my email in my profile.

Anyway, to me, the difference between curiosity and intellectual curiosity is the motivation behind it. A televangelist who discovers YouTube is not curious about how to use YouTube because he likes to figure out how things work; he is curious because he would like more ways to evangelize. Similarly, someone who upvoted this post is likely not intellectually curious about the phenomena involved; he's likely instead curious about how best to further his cause (which in this case is civil liberties). So, interested, yes, intellectual curiosity piqued, no.

Also, I'm not faulting the blogger. The blogger is a blogger; he blogs. I'm faulting the editors for not killing this, because it doesn't add content; it adds rallying cry.

I did flag it. I'm aware of the idea that people are supposed to upvote things that have something interesting in them. However, lately, it has been remarked elsewhere by people who are not me that politics have crept into the discussion well beyond the threshold of intellectual curiosity, and this was to me a flagrant example of something that in no way piqued anyone's intellectual curiosity, but instead triggered political feelings.

Things that are there for the purpose of intellectual intrigue do not have rallying cries for redistribution in bold as their first sentence, for example.

Also, I've observed the upvote vs. flag mechanism working for several years now. I agree that it does work in general. I posted this because I believe it is somewhat breaking down lately, in the form of political rallying cries reaching the front page.

I've been here for a while, and I already went through my six-month noob HN-is-reddit phase. That being said, in what possible way is this within the HN guidelines?

Yeah! Gimp sucks for precisely the reason that they fall headlong into that trap.

Yeah. Probably 90% of the people who end up doing this competition would end up enjoying it anyway if there was no prize; the prize just provides the activation energy to actually sign up.

Seconded. (Dropbox is obviously an awesome place to work, but I still prefer my current situation at the moment.)

There are two kinds of cleverness: cleverness that makes things simpler and easier to understand, and cleverness that makes things more complicated and harder to understand. Often the former is the more difficult of the two, and also the mark of a better programmer. Moreover, experienced-but-average programmers will often decry cleverness in general, having observed too many cases of the latter and not enough of the former kind, and then when the former kind comes along, they have the same reaction, and this is bad.

I have a feeling that those were by far the four most formative years for the company, and that his impact on the company's identity and so on was probably comparable to anyone other than Jobs's.

If nothing else, he created the expectation that superhuman technical feats would be performed on a daily basis, which exists to this day, and might well have stayed true to some degree even during the between-Jobs years, even if said feats were not in particularly productive directions.

Somebody enlighten me: in this day and age, with, you know, the Internet, why do recruiters exist at all? Why don't people just go up to companies and ask for jobs? Why don't companies go out and try to find people themselves? It seems like the results would be completely guaranteed to be better.

This is not the only evidence that he cares.

This post could only exist on HN. The particular point it's making is almost beside the point for me personally; for me, it's so amazing because anywhere else on the internet that I've been, Legion would get completely blown up for being a sexist racist capitalist communist anarchist fascist pigdog force.

So, yay for HN, and yay for not being reddit.

And, also, I agree with it.

Dunno. Offhand, if the HG diet is berries and meat, and the farm diet is bread and more bread, could be. But we already kinda knew that bread and more bread wasn't the best diet; cavemen don't add more information if that's what was going on.

Basically, what I'm saying is that the truth about nutrition and caveman diets are conditionally independent given currently actually-known science about nutrition. If we didn't have science, and all you had was cavemen observations, that might be valid, but we do, so it's not.

(And by "currently actually-known science" I mean very basic things like that we can't make iron from scratch so if we don't eat stuff with iron in it then we get sick, and same with some amino acids, and same with noticing that if you eat 20 cheeseburgers a day you get fat quickly. Not stuff like whether fat is bad or good.)

Also, not that you particularly exercised it here, but the whole what-did-cavepeople-eat argument is totally retarded. Cavepeople clearly could reproduce a fair amount of the time on the diet they had. That doesn't even a little bit mean that their diet was the diet people were 'designed for' or that that was even remotely related to their optimal diet.

(Which obviously doesn't necessarily mean that refined sugar is either good or bad.)

So we should all stop mentioning our ancestors when thinking about what to eat.