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bsaunderon The State of the Art is Terrible

I believe he's talking about the whole lot of it. Software and hardware . I think USBs suffer their own issues (see http://wiki.gbatemp.net/wiki/USB_Devices_Compatibility_List as a simple example (hint see the ""If the Device does not work" section)).

This fits the OPs notion that no one really understand the crap underneath it all.

bsaunderon We’re not going to have a jobless recovery. We’re going to have a jobless future

If government wants to create jobs, they need to encourage businesses to create new value (by paying them to create that value). Employers will then hire people to create the value (and pay them (after skimming enough profit off the top to make it worth the effort)). The problem is, of course this requires the government to spend more (not less) which seems strongly against the current momentum.

I'd suggest the modern version of the Depression era work programs and/or the 60s space race. Perhaps something launching a major technological leap in robotics (which ironically would exacerbate our job "problem").

bsaunderon Lost skills: What today's coders don't know and why it matters

I've been debugging plenty of distributed/parallel processing systems by trace statements. It's not trivially easy, but its not too bad (its actually kind of fun).

In fact, I'm not exactly sure how you would debug a multi-process parallel system with an external debugger. Would you simultaneously use multiple debugger instances to attach to each process? That sounds like fun.

For a true, parallel system it's virtually impossible to "examine the entire program's behavior" at any one instance in time. Sure printing changes the timing of things, but unless you are single threaded, you are kidding yourself to think that a debugger also doesn't disrupt timings.

bsaunderon Lost skills: What today's coders don't know and why it matters

I find analyzing trace statements to be far faster than setting conditional break points and stepping through a debugger.

I can quickly run a test, grep/skim through the trace output and ignore/drill down into detailed minutia that are irrelevant/relevant to the problem being investigated.

I also tend to write my trace statements in an easily parsible format so if I need to I can write another program to analyze what happened and find the problem. Writing a full on program to process log files happens less often than chaining several unix commands to find the needle in the haystack (usually the program happens when I need to thread together several widely separated trace lines).

bsaunderon Half-baked idea: Standard machine readable output for command line programs

I would be nice if this was done in terms of MIME Types. Perhaps similar to the "Accept" header in HTTP (though in this case the invoker is telling the program (aka server) what types it would like).

Of course this only solves the parsing problem, not the semantic one.

bsaunderon How to improve your programming skills

I've explored similar concepts. In particular I've found it rather powerful to be able to export/import code refs with:

use YAML::Syck; $YAML::Syck::UseCode = 1;

Watch out though, when you take executable code from a user.

bsaunderon Want Hacker News Comment Scores Back? Check out HNPoints.com

Perhaps because (s)he wants to share with the community that at least one person agrees with the comment:

Previously: click up arrow, score of parent shows as 2.

Now: click up arrow... no one knows. Post a comment to make it visible (ideally add some other relevant detail).

Definitely suboptimal.

bsaunderon Proof of work - an unobtrusive alternative to captchas

(there are lots of comments, a couple of months ago, it would have been easy to see which ones are "interesting", now you must read them all).

bsaunderon Why Can't Developers Estimate Time?

Almost all bad estimates are due to a lack of information. In software development, the information that tends to be missing are the particulars of the task being estimated (which code needs to be modified, in what way). This missing information is highly unique and not to generally transitive from one programing assignment to the next. Additional information about the process is usually not the problem. Things like CMM tend to focus on the process information rather than the particulars of the coding problem at hand. Which, leads many developers to think: "You're doing it wrong."

bsaunderon Report Finds Performance of Web Apps Throttled on iOS Devices

So, here's the link to the actual referenced report:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/03/15/apple_ios_throttles_...

IMO, it doesn't add much to the discussion except for this nugget at the very end of the article:

"This developer reiterates that if Apple didn't specifically introduce these problems in iOS, it's aware of them now. And he says that the Mobile Safari team has indicated the issues will not be fixed."

bsaunderon Interest in 3D animation? Get Messiah Studio Pro for $40 ($1200 retail value)

Does anyone here use this and have a recommendation on platform? My preference is Linux, MaxOS and Windows (in that order). But if not all platforms work equally well, I may reconsider.

bsaunderon The Youth Unemployment Bomb

Buy an Arduino and start building robots. IMHO, there's a long, rewarding career there.

bsaunderon Why You Can't Hire Great Perl Programmers

I've been using AnyEvent for several months now and really like it. It took some work to mentally sync up with it initially, but once it clicked I was happy I took the time.

bsaunderon On the Future of Computing

> Even with all the tech problems solved, the regulatory hurdles to implementing this are staggering.

I think we will "back in" to self driving cars. I think they will first appear as safety features on luxury cars (this is already happening). The real statistics of these features will become obvious. Eventually the car won't let the driver do anything stupid and people will become annoyed that they have to hold on to the wheel when basically the car could be doing that for them.

Earlier production models of self driving cars will work like cruise control. Perhaps the system analyzes the road conditions and in optimum environments it enables a button that engages autopilot with warnings when conditions degrade (eventually stopping the car if the driver does not resume control).

bsaunderon Firesheep: Easy HTTP session hijacking from within Firefox

Illumination is one thing. Enabling a ten year old to do malicious stuff with a few clicks and poorly considered actions is entirely another.

bsaunderon Data-Driven, Recursive Interfaces for Graph Data

Interesting article, thanks for posting. To mesh with the recent "Rands in Repose" post, this gave me some good relevance points to ponder for a little while.

I've developed a similar fascination with graph data over the past couple of years. My particular affliction has focused on treating program code as data (nodes) and stitched together with edges.

For visualization I was considering generating partial 3D models using something like StructureSynth and putting them in a 3D world like opencobalt. Also stumbled across Orange (http://www.ailab.si/orange/) which looks useful too.

bsaunderon Rands in Repose: How nerds and geeks parse the world

Good post. I find there is a lot of potential economic value in connections of information. Essentially this is innovation.

Find just a few useful concepts/tools/techniques not previously connected together. Figure out if there are any new useful emergent features that result. See if you can build a business model around the features. Implement. Market. Prosper.

bsaunderon Ask HN: Best Developer Linux Laptop?

I faced the same question a year ago. My solution was a MBP with Parallels running Ubuntu. I couldn't be happier. I'm still working more in Ubuntu than MacOS, but it's nice to have the fall back of the host operating system.

bsaunderon Ask HN: I'm done with the IDE. What's a good alternative?

If you stick with vim or emacs, you may want to check out ctags (or etags), to help you with some of the functionality you normally get in an IDE. IMHO, when you go the non-IDE route, you will forgo some features you are used to and satisfy those needs with alternative mechanisms. This is my personal preference. It's a bit of a learning curve, but I think you end up with a much better understanding how your code fits together.

bsaunderon Ask HN: What super projects could unite humanity?

Fully automated food production, shelter construction, power production, and transportation.

bsaunderon Fast polling using C, memcached, nginx and libevent

Thanks for taking the time to provide an update.

bsaunderon Fast polling using C, memcached, nginx and libevent

Just because of some novice mistakes, you want to discount the whole post?

Thank you for calling attention to the second comment.

bsaunderon For the Unemployed Over 50, Fears of Never Working Again

I'm not sure she and her husband would make it past a credit/employment check to satisfy a landlord.

bsaunderon Is The Web Dead?

I think we will see a migration towards 3D environments as the primary platform. I think 3D TVs will pave the way for computing devices (it may already have and I'm behind the curve).

It'll start with games but I wouldn't be surprised if we saw a 3D enabled "browser" within a couple of years. In the beginning it might be driven just by being 'cool'. But then I'm sure we'll see some real UI enhancements based on it (just like we saw with the recent AJAX/'JavaScript is Okay' trend).

So if "web is dead" refers to 2D HTML, I think it may be in it's sunset years. If it means external references from one piece of data to another, no way. That's here to stay, just in other forms.

bsaunderon Ray Kurzweil does not understand the brain

No a Java program requires an environment to run, so does a brain .

It's just that a brain alters it's behavior and structure as a result of processing inputs (development).

We don't (normally) write Java programs to change their behavior as they process information from their environment during execution.

bsaunderon Ray Kurzweil does not understand the brain

It doesn't directly encode the structure of the brain. Development is required.

Your Java program doesn't directly execute on the CPU, compilation and interpretation are required.

bsaunderon Diesel 2: Using generators for async (and back again)

Yes, that makes sense.

In my case, I ended up here by trying to dynamically shift where I'm applying the work load in the search space without pruning off an answer.

bsaunderon Diesel 2: Using generators for async (and back again)

Does anyone else see a trend in this migration to async style programming? I've been working on a similar issue for a while now involving a similarity search engine with nested state machines.

I can't quite tell if my perception of this trend is skewed by my current perspective or if there are more people exploring this model of programming. IMHO, some things get much harder to reason about without some good tools.

bsaunderon Ask HN: Anyone hosting their site on servers in their garage?

Also Linode and Slicehost handle power and network reliability issues better than your local service providers (probably).