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How can you judge the speed of "your"[1] programmers if you know nothing about programming?

Are you perhaps being misled by the frequent "I did X in a weekend" submissions? Those are mostly hyperbole.

[1] A little word of advice: Don't talk like a manager already. If your story is legit, the two grad students are quite likely to read it here.

sfkon Mixpanel: Scaling to the Internet - Writing C extensions for Python

SWIG has its own problems. Dependencies have already been mentioned, trusting obfuscated code is another issue:

http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=95863

"But even if I find the cause of the leak, I may not be able to plug it. M2Crypto is written using SWIG, which contains lots of obfuscated code and doesn't exactly give me a warm fuzzy feeling that it's always doing the reference counting correctly."

I prefer a clean handwritten C extension any day. There is a lot of repetitive work involved, but most of that is really just copy&paste, so it tends to go quickly.

sfkon No expectation of privacy on public transit

Instead, she brought more publicity to the event. She actually allowed a news outlet to cover the incident.

You know, I'm positively tired of the "Streisand effect" argument. Are we supposed to let anything pass out of fear that a mildly embarrassing situation escalates?

Perhaps she does not even care about the picture. Perhaps she does not want to live in a society where harassing unsuspecting individuals is acceptable. Without going public and finding like-minded people, nothing will change.

sfkon No expectation of privacy on public transit

1) "Any other content that is illegal, promotes illegal activity or infringes on the legal rights of others."

The site engages in commercial exploitation of photos of non-public persons without their consent.

2) "Content related to racial intolerance or advocacy against any individual, group or organisation."

The texts that accompany the pictures generally mock and harass the subjects. From the article:

"A recent picture of an obese woman sleeping had one comment: "OMG … it's 'The Bulk.'" Another, showing a pair of Hasidic Jews on a train, included a joke apparently referencing concentration camps during the Holocaust."

sfkon No expectation of privacy on public transit

You can report a policy violation to Google AdSense by clicking on the link in the bottom right corner of the offending site:

http://www.peopleofpublictransit.com/

I hope Google cuts them off.

sfkon Got a cease-to-exist from eBay for owning a domain with "bay" in it

There is no similarity between those two names. Beware however, that court decisions are completely arbitrary in these matters.

Look here for the tragicomedy of MobiliX vs. Obelix:

http://tuxmobil.org/mobilix_asterix.html

sfkon Charles Stross: Where we went wrong

I appreciate your confidence, but you are wrong:

OpenSolaris/suncc, Jacques' program:

  $ cat immutable.c
  #include <stdio.h>

  int main()
  {
    char * s = "abc";
    *s = 'c';
    printf("%s\n", s);
    return 0;
  }

  $ cc -o immutable immutable.c 
  $ ./immutable 
  cbc

EDIT: I can't reply to you, so I have to take this route. I also think that this behavior is not desirable. However, I do not see the passage in the the standard that forbids writable strings. On the contrary, in Annex J writable string literals are explicitly allowed as an extension, and I don't see any indication that the presence of writable strings make an implementation non-conforming.

Perhaps you could point to the passage in the standard that requires string literals to be immutable (your words, not mine) or that requires a compiler to issue a warning if a string literal is modified.

If you still wonder why I'm arguing this: It is not for the sake of nitpicking, but to support kabdib's post.

sfkon Charles Stross: Where we went wrong

From the standard [6.5.4][String literals]:

"If the program attempts to modify such an array, the behavior is undefined."

Hence there is no requirement to segfault.

sfkon P ≠ NP

Not that it matters, but there was the Wolfskehl Prize:

http://www.simonsingh.net/Wolfskehl_Prize.html

sfkon High-Frequency Programmers Revolt Over Pay

You were the one who said just lay the bricks. This clearly implies that laying bricks is an inferior task compared to coming up with models.

EDIT:jacquesm, do you have a voting ring or why are your posts at 2 points (and mine at 0) the instant you post?

sfkon High-Frequency Programmers Revolt Over Pay

Please refrain from using the bricklayer image here. It is demeaning, silly and wrong. In order to implement a mathematical model, a programmer has to:

  a) Understand the model.

  b) Come up with a fast algorithm for the specification.

  c) Prove the algorithm correct.

  d) Make no mistakes implementing the algorithm.

All of this has nothing to do with bricklaying. Moreover, it's quite ironic that the geniuses who come up with the models often "forget" point c) for their own work.

sfkon [dead]

Not worth reading. The author makes a completely unwarranted leap from C++/Java to C, then proceeds to "prove" the lack of readability in C by giving a expression that screams for a preprocessor macro.

sfkon Swedish pirate party to run the pirate bay from inside the Swedish parliament

When reading these articles, I continue to be amazed at how many euphemisms there are for "I want stuff for free".

sfkon Will the real programmers please stand up?

One of the main points of linked lists is that you can manipulate the structure (sort, reverse, etc.) without copying the payloads.

So in C, always in place unless explicitly specified otherwise.

sfkon Ask HN: Anyone using Python 3 in production?

http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-3146/

http://svn.python.org/view/python/branches/py3k-jit/

sfkon The Geek Talk with Derek Sivers

These things come and go (hopefully). A couple of years ago there were at least three Seth Godin articles per week.

sfkon New York Times Forces Apple to Pull Popular ‘Pulse’ iPad Newsreader

Is there an authoritative link for this? The article is written in a way that suggests that the feed is an integral part of Pulse.

One of the comments says: "Pulse actually ships with the NYT built in."

Without having cleared this up, it's difficult to judge the matter.

EDIT: If wired.com is not grossly incorrect, I do think that the feed was built in:

"The developers of Pulse, Akshay Kothari and Ankit Gupta, are bemused, and are planning to contact Apple to fix the problem. They’ll do this by removing the NYT’s feed from the app ..."

sfkon New York Times Forces Apple to Pull Popular ‘Pulse’ iPad Newsreader

"The Pulse News Reader app, makes commercial use of the NYTimes.com and Boston.com RSS feeds, in violation of their Terms of Use. Thus, the use of our content is unlicensed. The app also frames the NYTimes.com and Boston.com websites in violation of their respective Terms of Use."

I completely agree with this. People should stop arguing copyright matters on a purely technical level. Intent matters. The intent here is that other people should not make money off the RSS feed. This is exactly what happened in this case, so NYT's reaction is perfectly natural.

sfkon [dead]

Would you kindly stop spamming HN? Also, the voting here is quite suspect.

sfkon What would you lose if your Gmail, Flickr or Facebook were deleted?

Nothing.

sfkon Why aren’t you contributing (To Python)?

Do you mean ruby-lang.org? The problem is, what you consider excellent, other people may hate. I have far less problems navigating python.org than ruby-lang.org and I find the design of ruby-lang.org cheap.

My all time personal favorite project website is openbsd.org.

sfkon Women in tech - Stop talking, start coding

http://news.ycombinator.net/item?id=333168

sfkon Where Tcl and Tk Went Wrong

Tk has native "look and feel". I've written a Python Tkinter app and I was pleasantly surprised how good it looks on Windows.

sfkon Ask HN: How do you solve hard problems if you can't make incremental progress?

"I don't know why this comment is being modded down, this is a good idea (IMO)."

Because some people do not think about everything in monetary terms.

sfkon Why is JSON so popular? Developers want out of the syntax business

The Oxford Dictionary lists "raises the question" as a valid interpretation of the phrase.

sfkon PyPy Speed Center

Did anyone find the the sources for the benchmarks?

sfkon An attempt at the world's biggest math magic trick.

I suspect they couldn't do much with 0000000, where the first digit that is chopped off is my secret digit.

I was under the impression that this trick usually involves the difference of two numbers with the same digits.

sfkon Toyota braking problems discriminate against the elderly?

I'm young and guess what: I've seen web shops where the checkout process is broken. When that happens, I go to the competition rather than taking time to report the error.

sfkon Google Buzz

I'm afraid I don't agree with your use of the term "innovative". Regarding Gmail, I'd rather say they managed to clone mutt+procmail for the web in a reasonable manner.

Regarding Maps, the fundamental operations had been in place since at least 2002 at e.g. http://www.nl.map24.com/. Actually I haven't been there for quite some time, and I think in 2002 their interface was actually better than now.

sfkon How to become rich even if nobody is following you on Twitter

Do you have evidence that Google is cracking down on those? Because I frequently get both Wikipedia clones and various Usenet "archives" ranking very high in my search results.

Since they are always the same sites, they should be be easy to remove from the index.