jkeisling/hacker-news-corpus-2007-2022 huggingface dataset:
Your view is the broken window fallacy. [1]

All the man-hours and natural resources spent building all those roads and paying for all that gas to move around on them could have instead gone to expanding production.

For instance, funding new companies, scientific research, and so on.

That is the point of the article.

Of course, the article is fallacious in that expanding production is not inherently better than consumption, so consumption is not necessarily "wasteful."

If people had preferred to live in an apartment and invest their money, they would have. Other things being equal, suburban sprawl reflects peoples' economic preferences. People are willing to pay for all the resources to make suburban sprawl possible.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window

edit: though living in an apartment will be more expensive, so that wasn't a great example.
I take transit to work. I make a good living. I could chose to drive but where I live (Montreal) has good public transit. It takes me 20-25 minutes to get to work by subway (door to door.)

Mostly it's that I work downtown and chose to buy my condo in a neighbourhood with good transit. As a result, driving would "save" me 5 to 10 minutes but require 300$/month parking spot to actually save any time.

If I worked out in an industrial park (where my employer also has an office) driving would be a no-brainer however. Parking out there is free and transit is annoying (bus every 15-30 minutes during rush hour only, multiple connections.) At that office, from my house driving saves 10-15 minutes of commute during rush hour and 15-45 minutes outside of it. In extreme cases (our support staff working the graveyard shift) driving saves 2+ hours or a very expensive taxi ride.
We do wish Apple would provide better ways too, but using the processes isn't going to get you to a 100% anyways. We are (luckily) not dependent entirely on system processes and will (in a few days) see if we can ramp up our app detection with help from the community!
This statement is so true and so sad:

"What's potentially pretty damaging for people is passwords, because people may use the same password for logging into this network that they use for other things"

Use different passwords for different sites. Use strong passwords. Be careful about who you give your information.
Yes, it is harder than supporting Firefox.

Lean Designs makes heavy use of the canvas element and it would be impossible to implement on a browser like IE8 that doesn't support it. There are libraries like excanvas which help, but they're very limited (no toDataURL() and the like).

In order to support IE8 I'd have to severely limit what the app can do. Since this isn't an issue for 95%+ of the people visiting the site, it doesn't make sense to support it.
I've honestly never understood why Microsoft has invested so heavily in the search business but I also think it's incredibly misguided to suggest that Apple is Microsoft's biggest competitor at this point.

I might be overgeneralizing but Microsoft's core business is software. Apple's core business is building platforms for software. The only major overlap is in the world of operating systems. Microsoft cares very little about hardware and Apple cares a whole lot.

Microsoft's investment in WP7 makes absolute sense but, again, unlike Apple they aren't about to start building smartphones.

I'm not sure but somehow the Microsft vs Apple battle just doesn't seem particularly interesting anymore because they seem to be able to coexist pretty well. Google is the interesting player because they are taking stabs in both directions and stepping on everyone's toes. Somewhat reactively, both companies have tried to push their way into Google's core business. Apple at least seems to have a plan; Microsoft appears to just be throwing money at the problem.
In a word, NO!

Others have provided more detailed advise that whatever I could. So, I will keep it simple. Grandma says: Never put all your eggs in the same basket.

Even if you are young and not risk averse, you may want to put not much more than 60% in high risk/high return investments. And the way to do it is to bet on a bunch of things that have potential. You should expect that 80% of those will flop, 16% will give modest returns and 4% will be big hits that turn in your original invest many times over.

If you recover 33% of the money invested on the flops, and your regular winners produce a 50% return, you need the big hit to be at least 12x you initial investment, so you just break even with the opportunity cost of putting your money on the bank. And you need many, many bets so you hit a 100x winner or better.
I'm sorry, but after doing all the things in the list, you will not know anything about stack, dynamic memory, pointers and so on. You can never say you can program knowing those.
I'd do railsforzombies.org after tryruby.org (to perhaps interest the person in an application for ruby).
To add balance to the statement about asking an art student to give an opinion of your work to get your ego stroked, I had a far different experience. I went to art school, and from foundation year (where you learn a smattering of everything: drawing, painting, sculpting, etc.) to senior year (when I focused on film and animation) I constantly had my work reviewed. Sometimes I got effusive praise, and sometimes I left class devastated. Usually, the feedback was right-on, usually honest, and usually came from a good place. Learning how to express criticism of another's work, and learning how to accept constructive criticism of my own, was one of the most valuable skills I learned from school.

To make this germane to hacking: I'm kind of baffled that peer code review isn't the cornerstone of this industry. No one works best in a bubble, and everyone has something to teach and to learn.

One last thought -- context for feedback matters. It's a helpful, kind, human thing to do to give someone some helpful encouragement, even when it hasn't been earned yet.
I guess I was most amazed that in 1991 Apple's profits were greater than Microsoft's. I was playing Ultima 6 and King's Quest V back then... I didn't know anything existed but the IBM PC.
Android Studio is much better than Eclipse already, and it was built on the already mature Intellij IDE.
> [Alan] asked his department manager to assign another three programmers as a programming team

The scenario's quite believable. Many "programmers" out there got transferred from a user department, lied on their CV, and/or cheated the aptitude test. They can't code very well. Or maybe their coding level's up to scratch but they can't coordinate and communicate with other programmers, hence meetings and numerous drafts of what's been agreed on. Or perhaps work is hard to find or some programmers are getting older, so they deliberately complicate the task or the program to keep themselves in a job.
Yes. If you want to complain about the exact numbers, start with these

> Charles announces he has completed the project. He submits a 500 line program.

> Charles did produce about 5 lines of code per day. This is perhaps a little above average.

Obviously that's not the point though.
There is no C...
He probably mixed up several facts:

1. This practice is not done anywhere in the EU AFAIK, only in the US.

2. Only the biological DNA sample is kept, not any digital version of it. It would obviously be cost-prohibitive to fully sequence the gnome of every single newborn baby.

But other than that, he's right. DNA samples of every newborn baby in the US is indeed being kept by the government, indefinitely and without parental consent.

https://www.aclu.org/free-speech-technology-and-liberty-wome...
Your points are great and valid but isn't it even simpler to point out the flaw in OPs argument: if the end-all and be-all is the economics of the company then they should surely be fine going in to work tomorrow and offering their boss a 20% pay cut to help contribute to the economics of the company...
Well I can understand Apple, they are at least a major tech company. But Ford has no use for /8...
Maybe actually. In some jurisdictions this would require a license from the government to do the reception. The UK is like this with their tv licenses for the BBC and similar. I can't imagine theyre the only ones like this. And then there's possibly compression technologies that might need to be licensed from the mpeg group, etc.
Yes, it's also economically efficient. A moral objection to land taxation is common enough that I now lead with the moral argument.
"Google generously adds fuel to this culture of openness and community through Google Summer of Code."

You don't get to call yourself generous. If it's so obviously self-serving then it's not generosity at all.
What do you mean by 'in private' here? The criticism in your other comment seems to be based on things that he said at a public or at least semi-public event.
There's a severe problem where many people fall into groups that are diametrically opposed to one another. Not only do they want opposite policies, it's so bad that even framing the exact same policy as coming from one group or the other inverts the resulting appeal. Of course, what you're asking for is possible to some extent and should be pursued vigorously and maybe that pursuit is lacking, but it's also important to recognize that, prior to a monumental social movement that changes everything, applying your obviously good advice consistently is actually impossible.
New? P791 was 10 years ago
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=CKAyJ3zKTus
Indeed. Meet the Miller family - http://edventureproject.com/wordpress/?page_id=3 ("We spent a year touring most of Europe and part of North Africa on our bicycles… with all four kids")

Or the Vogel family - http://familyonbikes.org/blog/?page_id=10 ("The Vogel family left June 8, 2008 for a 2 1/2 year bicycle trip traversing the Pan-American Highway from Alaska to Argentina.")

It can be done.
IPv6 is such a mess that the DoD needs to ensure that when IPv6 is claimed as "supported" by a vendor, that it actually does work. There are plenty of bugs, corner cases, and limitations in what vendors are offering.

This "strong-arming" is not that much different than asking a new car salesman why he is selling GM while personally driving an Audi.
...and the site's already down. Can someone c/p the text?
$2000 to $8000? Sounds pretty sketchy.
I'm torn... I do support net neutrality. But I guess I also believe that markets get the products they deserve. And if they choose to support operators that constrain their content choices then they are idiots.

I do wonder if net neutrality is supported by a small number of elite/intelligent folk who would be careful in their choices of which providers to support, but realise that given the wider stupidity of the market, their overall lack of market clout will lead to them having no option but to choose a crappy service.

sigh... gives the phrase 'Forcing people to be free' - yet one further dimension.
> we need better, more cost-effective energy, such as with better nuclear power plants

I don't think this will work. Some numbers:

* USDA says 70 bushels/acre of wheat is the average yield for irrigated fields [1]

* perhaps a theoretical 3 harvests/year [2] could be possible in a climate-controlled building (it takes 110-130 days between planting and harvest), for 210 bushels/acre/year

* solar irradiation amounts to an annual average of about 4 kWh/day/m^2 = 170 W/m^2 in the wheat belt [3], or up to about 6.5 kWh/day/m^2 = 270 W/m^2 average in July

* March 2011 wheat futures are $7.67/bushel on the CME [4]

So I reason: with the cheapest $0.05/kWh electricity (nuclear, hydro, or coal at large-buyer rates), the cost to imitate sunlight, with "100% efficient" lighting (maybe LEDs), would be in the range of $300,000-$500,000/acre per year [5]. (I think the higher figure is closer -- it corresponds to sustaining July-level insolation year round, which would make sense for year-round planting). Which divides up to about $2,500/bushel -- over 300 times current prices. (For household-scale perspective, this is $70/liter).

You can get incremental improvements in power plant economics, but not orders of magnitude (not anytime soon). Given current technology and economics, this idea falls apart.

[1] http://ww.agcensus.usda.gov/Publications/2002/Volume_1,_Chap...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheat#Agronomy

[3] http://rredc.nrel.gov/solar/old_data/nsrdb/redbook/atlas/ (use "horizontal flat plate")

[4] http://www.cmegroup.com/trading/agricultural/

[5] calculation:
http://www.google.com/#sclient=psy&hl=en&q=0.05+USD%...
Site is down and that entry is not in the google cache, anyone who saw it want to summarize?
So I guess a successful team at Google should group quit, create a social me to product then wait to be acquired for a few years bonus salary for all by either Google or another of the big players.
What, like the fact that he didn't replace Gates like had been done with almost every single Secretary Of Defense in the past? Note how in recent years new presidents typically have appointed a new SoD [1]. Not replacing Gates was a de facto appointment.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Secretary_of_Defe...
If it's solely for the purpose of making money (as opposed to learning for the challenge/curiosity) then do some research: freelancer.com, odesk etc etc. I'd check which technologies are in demand and go from there. It's also important to play to your strengths, for instance i find web development very finiky, i tend to excel in more meaty things like transaction processing. hth
Indeed! I didn't know about this site, thanks.
Eh, of all the possible contexts that '*' could be interpreted as having significant meaning, I'd definitely say unix name globbing comes before pointers in C.

(though I also think interpreting '42' as an ascii sequence is looking for something where there is nothing...)
Just because it might be the foundation for another bigcorp is not a particularly strong reason. People should migrate if they want to keep using it, and Yahoo/Delicious will probably anonymize the leftovers regardless.
> the doc is unclear as to what it brings on the table, why it should be used, how to be used, the improvement it brings if any are really not clear.

I assume you're looking at the non-dev PSGI specification on CPAN. We're working on revising the documentation to upgrade the specification to 1.1, as well as improving the FAQ document.

Just to address your concern, I improved the part where it explains the benefits of switching to PSGI:
https://github.com/miyagawa/psgi-specs/commit/e3e756cf1eebe8...

Also, for more generic overview and introduction of what PSGI is and why it is useful, take a look at my slides at OSCON 2010: http://www.slideshare.net/miyagawa/plack-at-oscon-2010

- miyagawa
The problem that the author describes is certainly a real one. If you want to hack on an open source project, it is sometimes tricky to figure out how to get the source and dependencies and then build the thing. Still, surely the actual process of learning the codebase and making changes to the code involve far far more effort for any non-trivial open source project. So you can make it easy to get started hacking the code but that's only a small part of the overall process.
I am interested. What did him and Wiener work on?
If you have any predisposition towards psychosis, in family history or personally, please avoid LSD.

For those firmly rooted, it might be pleasurable or productive to become a little less so. If you're already sometimes on the edge, LSD can push you over.

This happened to one of my best friends. Growing up he was crazy, creative, always saw things a little differently, prone to manic behavior. After a year of regular LSD use he was unable to form a coherent sentence. Please be careful.
Agreed; but with an availability date of 2011-06-20 we should see something soon.
A couple of things that are left out of the story:

- The area in question is blighted. This isn't an old area like SoHo is old. Think of the worst images of New York City from forty years ago. Think of the Charles Bronson vigilante movies from the 1970's.

- If you've been to a top school in the past few years you know that they've been involved in an arms race of building facilities. If you want to be a top university in this country you need to be able to attract the top faculty and students. You need the infrastructure. In NYC this is almost impossible given the cost of real estate and overcrowding. Columbia isn't doing this as a capricious act. It needs to expand if it is going to survive as a premier university. This isn't being done to build luxury dorms for rich undergrads. This is being done to provide new research and teaching facilities so that a two hundred fifty year old university can continue into the future.

- The businesses in question are the last in the area. Over the last ten years or so there has been a lot of back and forth between the university and its surrounding neighborhood. Some of it Columbia should be very embarrassed (perhaps even ashamed about) but after much squabbling the businesses in the article are the last holdouts. There is a lot being given back to the community by Columbia to make up for taking a larger part of the neighborhood. This includes cash payments, new schools, new community centers and housing for those displaced.

- The businesses in question were offered payment much in excess of what their properties are worth. The warehouse company was also offered a swap for real estate in a much more desirable location in the area. It agreed to the swap and then reneged on the deal.

The situation sucks but it's the world we live in. It's almost impossible for an institution to grow in the center of a major urban area. At the same time those institutions must grow if the urban area is to remain vibrant for its citizens going into the future. All things considered I think Columbia has been getting a raw deal in the condemnations like the one in the NY Post. It's easy pickings for the paper to rile up it's readers but in the end it only hurts the city as a whole.

I'm not part of Columbia but my wife is an alumni and my daughter is a current student there.
These are interesting ideas. I'd like to hear from any founders who have used any of these methods, and to what extent they were beneficial in gauging the eventual level of success of an idea.
This piece succeeds because it spells the steps out clearly and tells you there are three very big counter-examples. So if you're trying to change the way people spend time and/or communicate, how do you get validation?
That totally depends on the regex: http://www.ex-parrot.com/pdw/Mail-RFC822-Address.html
Me too. As someone who looked at Bedework[1] a while back, I'd like to know if she considered it.

[1] - http://www.bedework.org/bedework/
Actually, if you consider the return example in the blog, you do need to learn some caveats and rules. That's the point.
I'm from San Diego, so after completing college, I came back here. It was the default place to go.

I'm now getting an itch for some bigger city life, and to take some time away from usual and familiar routine. SF and NY are tempting options.
Since the site has hit its quota, I'll post my reply here:

I had the same experience, just ten years earlier. I was the lead programmer of resident evil 2 for the N64. Project was on time, under budget. Client was so happy it got Angel a little title called "Red Dead Revolver", which R* took over from Capcom when they bought Angel.

You want to know how we got the RE2 deal? I'll tell you: Chris Fodor and I noticed that you could spend 5 days a week totally fucking everything up and not get fired. You could lose Nintendo as a client by utterly failing to hit any deadline - and not get fired. You could be lead of a project that didnt ship, and then be lead of another project that didnt ship, rinse, repeat.

So we decided to spend monday working on our job, and the rest of the time working on a tech demo. We then presented our ideas to the programmers at the company. Of course, only a few senior programmers voiced their opinion, and their opinion was "that wont work". So then we ran the demo of it working.

Diego showed up a week later with a choice of two titles, one of which was porting RE2 to the N64.

I was fired a few weeks after we shipped.

I used to believe that the role of an employee was to maximize the value for shareholders. I still choose to believe this role, which is basically why I am only employable at start-ups, where it is still true. At any other company, the role of the employee is to maximize the value for the employee and the other employees that think likewise.

So welcome to the world of start-ups. You're now unemployable by most everyone else.
I can't imagine this is true. I would say the made up the study to be more interesting.
Angry Birds Privacy policy:
http://www.rovio.com/index.php?page=angry-birds---frequently...

I was pissed until I read the FAQ and discovered when they're using data and what they're using it for. Basically: If you've registered with Crystal Something-or-Other they send your data to them. The WSJ article, at least in the Angry Birds case, seems to have sensationalized things.
You don't even need wireshark for that. When you install an app on Android, it displays the list of permissions that the application is requesting. One of the possible permissions is "Read Contacts". If you've installed an app that has "Read Contacts" permission, then ...err.. it can read your contacts db. If the app also has "Internet" permission, then yeah, it probably could zip up your contacts DB and push it out somewhere.

However, if the app doesn't have "Read Contacts" permission then there is no way for the app to access your contacts db, and so reason to worry about it sending your contacts db to someone.

Or course, most apps do request "Internet" permission, so I suppose those apps could be scraping up some info they do have info to and sending that out to a 3rd party. :-(
Link to technical paper: http://infoscience.epfl.ch/record/186014/files/saw-infocom13...
Actually, Clive seems to be dead. There's been no activity on the Google Group since May 2014.
> It's amazing to hear they put it together in one night at a diner! :-D

I guess you're saying that in good humor. But I'll add this because it makes me appreciate how these things happen:

> What happened was this. We had used the original UTF from ISO 10646 to make Plan 9 support 16-bit characters, but we hated it.

"We hated it" -- there is just so much going on in those 3 words. They could have been suffering with the previous state for a year for all we know. And even if not, to know you hate something just takes a lot of system building experience to get to. And then when opportunity struck they probably already had a laundry list of grievances they had built up over that time and were ready to pounce.
>How can they be trusted anymore?

They never could be.
>"On finding customers

Our initial users were mostly early tech-adopters looking for a new innovative cross-platform email client. We found those by posting on different tech discovery communities like ProductHunt. Those early and mostly solo users wanted a different set of features than

what would ultimately become our real paid customers: small and midsize businesses.

This tricked us for a while in a race to build more and more features not so consistent with our vision. For instance, we started offering read tracking as it was one of the most requested features of early adopters. Many users upgraded to a paid plan for this alone; they weren’t interested in any of the collaborative features of the app. Those soloish users were churning at a far greater rate than real teams and they were requiring far more customer support/server resources per dollar earned. At some point, this reality sank in and we decided to focus entirely on teams. We ditched read tracking as it was a magnet for such misaligned customers. Our churn rate plummeted.

The hard-learned lesson: have the courage to say no."