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I'd expand - it's not enough to avoid throwing a ton of settings to a user, you have to design so they are not needed at all.

For me, the fact that you have to hide the "power-user" options, be it on the registry, about:config or under an "advanced" dialog somewhere is a sign of something much worse. All those toggles increase complexity of the software exponentially as they can be combined affecting each other, increasing the effort of understanding the code, making changes, testing, even the runtime complexity.

Lots of developers, when faced with a choice, make it configurable instead of thinking hard about it and making the choice. Developers are never popular when they decide against adding an option. I see it all the time on Google Chrome, or even on the iPhone to name some popular examples.

But some choices, even if they are hard to make, should be made.

Ugh. Googling Little Coder problem matches "small code problems" and "little codec problems" before something remotely related to what I wanted. There's a single relevant result in the first page.

The verbatim search returns a very good match in #1 and about 80% of the results seem appropriate. It seems the recent synonyms fixes are not nearly enough.

And, for the interested: http://blog.steveklabnik.com/posts/2009-12-28-the-little-cod...

It was, indeed, auto-generated:

https://twitter.com/#!/notch/status/181791985164746753

This screenshot is from way before his comment above, so it was indeed 6502 at that time. See also:

https://twitter.com/#!/notch/status/183222415428554754

He tweeted this picture while debugging the CPU a couple weeks ago:

http://i.imgur.com/DhmFp.png

Sounds like fun.

I'd watch experts programming. Games are definitely one of the most interesting areas, but if I wanted to learn some new technology, or just pick up new tricks I think other projects would be interesting too.

I think a good feature to measure would be the number of duplicates a story has multiplied by the number of days between submissions (normalized somehow).

I have this theory that "atemporal" stories (technical analysis, insightful essays, etc) that keep getting resubmitted every year are more interesting than news about the latest gadget. I've written about it before: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2505081

a.k.a - the non-apology:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-apology_apology

I think there's a good chance that these patches are for backdoors that would be discovered looking at the source.

I await for someone brave enough to get the source and publish a security analysis.

Sounds unlikely. If my hard drive crashes, how do I get my files back? (the whole point of the service)

Sounds somewhat like Code Bubbles:

http://www.andrewbragdon.com/codebubbles_site.asp

I don't see how that can work. What would the server compare the received salted hash with, if it has never seen the plaintext?

The point of hashing is from the difficulty of reversing it; generating a string that when hashed matches that value should be difficult. That way, even if someone has access to the hashes, he is unable to login - he needs the password.

If you accept the hash from the client, anyone having the hash is able to login, making hashing pointless.

Most likely they have been explicitely disabled to workaround problems.

They have been handling domain seizure orders:

http://www.techspot.com/news/46481-judge-oks-private-domain-...

    an injunction against the top-level domain name registry, directing it to change the registrar of record for the domain names to GoDaddy (!);
    an injunction telling GoDaddy to change the DNS data for the domain names so the domain names resolve to a site where a copy of the case documents are hosted (servingnotice.com/sdv/index.html);

There's more to software development than websites.

I don't see any reference that this is a Google project, but interesting nonetheless.

You're paying for the performance. You wouldn't pay that just to hear the studio songs be played over the amps. And I guess you'd be fairly satisfied even if they only played songs you haven't heard before.

NoiseTrade, referenced in the original post, seems to be exactly that:

http://www.noisetrade.com/info/about

Does "owning" a song makes any sense in the digital world, or is it a relic of the physical album days?

Even besides the licensing/ownership fact (you have always purchased a license to listen to the music privately), I bet there's more music released in a given day than hours in that day. I keep thinking that the model where you can just listen to whatever you want for a flat flee makes a lot more sense in this universe.

In iD games, there's a clean division between game-specific logic (which is usually in a separate DLL, haven't looked too closely at Doom3 yet), and framework/engine code.

On Quake 2, you could replace the DLL to switch between the regular game and capture the flag. An expansion with new mecanics could, theoretically, be done with only DLL code and new assets. You'd need to change the engine code only to add new kind of effects that it didn't support yet.

So yes, if you don't change any code, you'll only reskin Doom by creating new assets (it's usually called Total Conversion). If you want to add new game mechanics, you have to write some code.

Julian Bucknall just posted an article he wrote for PCPlus last year on this very subject.

http://blog.boyet.com/blog/pcplus/pcplus-297-arithmetic-with...

As usual, well explained and interesting.

These are kernel developers saying that the majority of crash reports they receive are caused by the virtual box driver.

Chrome was the previous name of Oxygene, a .net language derived from pascal:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxygene_(programming_language)

The browser kinda stole the thunder from their name.

I find that expecting a twist lowers the enjoyment. The twist, when it arrives, tends to usually be anticlimatic. If it turns out there's no twist, it ruins the whole experience.

I think that's why Shyamalan's later movies are considered so badly.

The "prediction error" point is interesting; I feel cheated when the twist is not so much a twist but hidden information; when one could never have suspected of the truth because not all facts where given. For example, I found the ending of the movie Number 23 to ruin the movie for me, so frustrating it was.

On the other hand, when it makes perfect sense, and facts were there all along, the twist is satisfying. That's why Sixth Sense is so popular.

Also, spoilers aren't always about twists. Telling me the whole plot of a movie robs me the experience of discovering it as it goes. Some of movies I enjoyed watching the most were ones I went in knowing absolutely nothing of what it was about (also some of the ones I disliked the most, but that's another story).

From the full article:

The confidence of the SuperCollider programming language has been set to 80%. The reason for this is quite funny. In order to prove that the TIOBE index can be manipulated easily, Adam Kennedy created an empty Perl library called Acme-SuperCollider-Programming. This was to boost the unknown programming language SuperCollider by adding it to Perl's popular library archive CPAN. Now 20% of all +"SuperCollider programming" come from this artificial library.

Yes, quite funny indeed, but not for the reasons they think. Just to show that Tiobe methodology is a joke. I don't understand how people take this seriously.

>Does WoW have duping problems?

Not really. I can recall just one time where someone found an exploit to do so, probably 3+ years ago, which was handled quickly.

Sure. But it is still ad hominem regardless.

ad hominem: his argument is invalid because he is a SEO consultant.

not ad hominem: his argument is invalid because [reason]. he ignores [reason] because he is a SEO consultant.