I'll admit that the info is somewhat interesting. But I have absolutely no respect for Techcrunch anymore. For a company/blog that garnered a ton of respect over the last few years for helping to promote interesting new startups, they have strayed far from that ideal. That they would accept information that was obtained illegally and then proceed to broadcast that to the world is dishonorable. They can't be trusted to be responsible any more.

For any number of upcoming and existing startups whose founders and employees read HN, I can't imagine that they would want any kind of ties to Techcrunch after this. I know that I sure as hell don't.

For what it's worth:

ev: "@TechCrunch @arrington "we have been given the green light by Twitter to post this information" What?! By whom? That's not our understanding"

(http://twitter.com/ev/status/2676203744)

What percentage of people who don't own a TV, like to tell you at every single opportunity that they don't own a TV.

In other words, bing now has some calculation abilities. MS is running an ad with this particular calculation suggested as a Bing search and a background photo of a blackboard.

Well, as you see, it works. And (I presume) they would like you think about the fact that throwing the same equation at Google does nothing useful (inexplicably, the first result was a page about BSD).

But I wonder how many users of this feature will be familiar with the rules of operator precedence? I admit I read it as:

x-3

--- = ... << I can't format it right but you get the idea

x-1

After testing it with Google, I went to Alpha, which (unsurprisingly) handled it with aplomb, giving it to me with proper notation as well and making me aware of my mistake. So I tried it as (x-3) / (x-1) = (x-4) / (x-5), which Alpha also handled with Aplomb (11/3 if you are lazy).

However, inputing the latter into Bing (without or without spaces for padding) gave no calculation or result, but just a bunch of (mostly unrelated) search results. Seems rather counter-productive on MS's part.

Apologies if this is excessively trivial.

"Joel boasts that for 1/10 the hardware they have performance comparable to similarly size sites. He wonders if these other sites have good programmers. Let's see how they did it and you be the judge."

Let me be the judge then. For a site serving 13 million pageviews per month (80% of them are uncachable searches) we use 2 servers with about the same configuration (same memory, cpus). The database server has an average load of 1 and the application server (that is serving a bunch of other sites as well) is under 2 most of the day.

We have 1/2 of their capacity running an equally heavy site (all sites running on those servers make up 16-18 million pageviews per month). So if they run on 1/10 of similar sites, we run on 1/2 of their 1/10. Even better we pay 100% percent less of what they are paying. I wonder how smart Atwood is.

I don't intend to be a smart ass here. I would never say "Hey we run with 1/10 of your capacity, you are stupid" because performance heavily depends on the application. StackOverflow probably has a 90% cache hit ratio (86% of visitors are from google that land on some question asked some days or months ago). So 3 servers for a cache and forget site (logins and bits for pages that change often can be cached too) serving 16M pageviews per month is below average. They maybe doing a whole lot of other things in the backend that we don't know of , but the same goes for the other sites that "their programmers are stupid and use 10x hardware."

I would expect them to say what problems they solved and how instead of bragging about how awesome programmers they (he?) are.

Have you ever stopped to think that one of the reasons that people evangelize TDD is because it has worked for them and they want to share that with you?

Here are things TDD gets me in my everyday work:

* I don't have to refresh the web page and re-fill in my forms to see if the record saves correctly this time.

* I don't have to log out and log in as a different user to see how things work

* I can plan an API much easier with tests that I write first.

* I know that my features are done when my tests pass

* I can write new tests to prove that bugs my users encounter are really bugs. (You can't get everything tested the first time, but fixing bugs is much easier with tests)

* I can upgrade to a new version of a framework or library because when stuff breaks, I have a roadmap of what I need to change. I can then give a customer an accurate estimate of what it will take to do the work cos I KNOW what I have to fix.

You're doing it wrong if you write ALL your tests first. You write one, and you only write enough test to cover the feature you're implementing. then you implement the code to make it pass. This iteration takes no significant time at all to an experienced programmer, and automated tools can run in the background, monitoring your code for changes and only running the tests your code impacts. Because we're programmers, and we know how to write code that does that.

You think this is a joke? Something to be ignored? Go ask a CPA (accountant) how they do the books.

They sure don't just do the math once and say "trust me I'm really just that good." They balance the books. Dual-entry accounting. They do this because they are disciplined professionals. And people pay big money to accountants to get that right. Your tests shouldn't exist to exist, they should prove your code does what you want. Checks and balances.

Of course the path to this is the same path one takes to learn a new language. It will be slow to start. It was for me, but really, it's such a huge win for my long-term productivity. I am happier, my clients are happier.

Really, what's not to like?

The kind of people who read Hacker News are very, very unrepresentative of the canonical Yahoo user. The real page views and money come from sites like Yahoo Sports, the home page, games, personals - destination sites intended for the average Jane or Joe. Yahoo serves that audience well, even though they do many other things terribly.

Unbelievable. The thing about fog creek is that they want highly competent technical engineers without any entrepreneur spirit. Joel is the leader and he needs code monkeys to carry out the work. People who make 4.0s are the exact kind of people they need-- discipline, reverence for authority, people pleasers-- people who won't rock the boat. For Fog Creek this is a great litmus test.

Think I'm full of it? Watch their little movie they put together then tell me I'm not spot on. (I hope you enjoy pimple faced programmers verbally fellating joel spolsky)

http://www.projectaardvark.com/movie/

Incidentally, Google has a similar aesthetic, although not to the same degree. People who are drawn to startups are not usually the kind of people you want in a corporate structure.

May I politely tell you to "bog off"?

I've never blogged about this change in my TV owning situation, and never bored anyone with it. It occurred to me that I was probably not alone and having been hassled by the TV licensing people in the UK because they don't seem to believe me, I wondered how many other people don't have a working TV.

I'm not here to be holier-than-thou about it. But if you want an argument then, how about "what percentage of people who have a TV, get all defensive when they discover someone who doesn't have one?"

Alright, that's pretty damning. As of now, I'm jumping on the "let's ban Techcrunch links from HN" bandwagon.

Please don't post homework problems to this newsgroup.

The question presents itself: why would someone that good want to work on project management software with such a funky user interface and oddball feature set?