jkeisling/hacker-news-corpus-2007-2022 huggingface dataset:
This article goes a bit off the rails a bit in the middle where the writer discusses their long journey through ideological shifts as a way to justify a criticism of rationalists. In this regard, it seems Scott Alexander is just a proxy for an internet punching bag. Rationalism is a vague, fluid concept. He has a prolific body of work. Therefor, he must represent the rationalist community. Very little of this addresses the actual questions of journalism.

> There’s a specific kind of misunderstanding that’s pervasive in tech, and it falls in this taxonomy of fallacies somewhere between the commentary/reporting confusion, and Uncle Chico.

This obviously cuts both ways - isn't it just as easy for journalists to misunderstand other industries? Why is it the responsibility of the ~victim~ subject to know how they are being reported on?

> The malicious journalist thesis is the one that was the hardest on my ocular muscles yesterday. Scott Alexander—the figure at the center of the piece—believes this, and has advanced this theory that the journalist who wrote the piece, and perhaps The New York Times institutionally, were out to smear him.

If you read his writing, Scott Alexander was actually incredibly gracious about the journalist in question, even going so far to say it was probably not their fault. Ironically enough, if the writer was familiar with SSC, she would know that she is looking for a lot of words to describe "Mistake Theory": https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/01/24/conflict-vs-mistake/

But again, it seems like nobody actually cares that the argument isn't that whether the coverage was good or bad. It's a bad characterization of the content! The reporting was inaccurate, and the subject didn't want to be interviewed!

> And another structural reality is that organizations--companies, say, startups--are terrible at policing themselves. What journalism seeks to do is illuminate the areas where destructive means are being utilized to achieve ends that might actually be virtuous or worthy in some other way.

What if the journalists are the ones doing something destructive??!!!! You don't get to magically absolve yourself of your sins because your pursuit is noble! How do you get off criticizing the tech industry when you engage in the same crime of thinking you are on the side of righteousness?

> It makes a lot of people uncomfortable when they can’t control their self-presentation, and this extends to journalistic portrayals.

With good right! If anything I learned from this article it's that journalists are too busy to care about making sure they characterize the content correctly.
In this context it’s Hack In The Box, a security conference.
What was Tabb's contribution to JS?
Hmm. Are you saying that one's shell is not very important, then? That one shouldn't care what shell they are using? I'm sorry, but, otherwise, I don't think I understand why you felt compelled to pick out this single quote from the article and argue about it. Could you explain your point?
The guy really does Tweet entire essays in little chunks. I wish these transcripts tried harder to capture the breaks between Tweets, though. They are an important form of punctuation; though obviously most of them need to be deemphasized to make the result readable as paragraphs, some of them are meaningful.
Could anyone here give me some insite as to why to use smalltalk? I've been toying with objective C which is about the extent of my experience with anything remotely like it. This article mentions ease of debugging- what is easy about it? What sort of problems does this language solve eloquently?
Odd. I've usually just returned or assigned the function def without the outer parens. For some reason, the outer parens syntax looked like it was defining an anonymous function, and also calling it immediately, which is of course not what that turns out to do.

It's an interesting language, but I'm still at the dabbling stage. I'd like to think I'm past the voodoo stage (onfoo="whack()" attributes that call in-page functions with global variables), but maybe not.
Depending on the type of tea, you're going to want:

* Some sort of brewing vessel

* Filter

* Measuring spoon

* Whisk

* Bowls / Cups

* Wide selection of tea
(FYI), I was confused about the table structure so I looked it up. The revenue number is his raw retail sales value generated, and his "advertising fee" is his commission earned on those sales. Amazon has a chart for how much you can earn (https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/gp/associates/join/comp...)

So he was only making about $100/month, which is cool for some extra food money, but with his cleverness, I could see him easily figuring out some scheme to generate thousands like most blackhat affiliate marketers.
I ran a hosting company on the side for about 10 years before starting http://www.Olark.com. Basically, hosting is pretty much a commodity right now, and big companies are willing to spend upwards of $100 to acquire a single virtual hosting customer.

Here's what I would avoid:

1) competing on price

2) building a commodity

If you focus on customer service, you won't fail your customers, your product can be mediocre i.e. (http://www.tiptopwebsite.com) and with the right connection to your customers you can still make money.

If I was going to start a new hosting company today. My cheapest plan would be $25 a month. I'd shoot for superb service, and try to find a really wealthy under-served part of the market to focus on. I'd try to build something that was unique, i.e. not a commodity. (That said, as an executive in a webhosting company, you probably know how tough it is to compete in webhosting)

Good luck!
My grandmother's catchphrase to all of her children and grandchildren when they're struggling with their little ones is "You're enjoying this. You really are. You just won't realise it for another 20 years".
"I am the wisest man alive, for I know one thing, and that is that I know nothing." - Socrates
It's the other way around. The keyboard was the foundation for the programming languages and shortcuts, like moving with hjkl in vim. No German keyboard user would have created a language like C with curly braces, when you would break your fingers typing this (alt 8 is {, alt 9 is }, and alt+5 is [, alt+6 is ] ).

I use a US keyboard for that exact reason
And all that nuance puts it overwhelmingly into opinion territory!
Yeah, good point about the letters being no better, and it boiling down to sedentary behaviour.

Thanks for this response.
No guessing needed. You only get them in the EU because the EU government decided to stand with people not wanting to be tracked everywhere and other governments have not (yet?) gone that way.

California has enacted some relevant policy in that direction, but IIRC it does not require consent in the same way the EU legislation does.
ah, the Polish Alt-Right is a problem?
The analogy doesn't work: there's a low barrier to entry for restaurants, and there are many to choose from.

In mobile phones it's basically iOS-Android duopoly. The barrier to entry was too high even for Microsoft. To compete you need to write a compelling OS, attract millions of app developers, and survive against competitors who subsidize their OS development with their bigger businesses.

So it's more like complaining that "Panda Corp." and "Chopstick Inc." control the entire food supply chain, block sales of food for dishes they don't like, and force all restaurants to pay them 15%-30% of all their revenue.
Sufficiently Advanced Technology

https://lab.cccb.org/en/arthur-c-clarke-any-sufficiently-adv...
They don't really need an incentive; old people do vote.
In my free time, I mostly do whatever I feel like, so I experiment on random projects - I don't necessarily care whether I finish them, but I have fun and learn new things.
It's an observation of metastasized hubris [1].

Normally an individual with overweening pride got smote down by the gods with some, but limited, collateral damage.

But what happens when the whole nation ("the condition of man") forgets Providence and deems herself hubristically self-sufficient ("satiety and arrogance")?

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubris
I don't think "cargo cult" means what the author thinks it means. It's not just a general epithet.
This is simply false. In 2008, 78% of the poor chose not to work (or even seek work) more than 26 weeks/year. See the link I provided in my edit.

If you bothered to read your link as far as the third paragraph, you would realize they redefine poverty to be $41k/year. By that definition, more than half of France lives in poverty, oh noes!

http://www.insee.fr/fr/themes/tableau.asp?reg_id=0&ref_i...
List view is coming up. The user has to login using Twitter OAuth though (Twitter API requirement).
I think ordering by affinity is a very interesting idea to pursue.
Thank you
I usually multiply how long I think it would take to do a task by three - it has not failed me.
I hate to be the person saying something like "koalas are only in terrible trouble, not awful trouble", because it's clear that the issues are serious (not to mention the over-arching issue of climate change). But in an article linked from this one there's this quote:

"The number given by the Australian Koala Foundation is much lower than the most recent academic estimates, but experts agree that koala numbers in many places are in steep decline."

So the line about "experts" in the Forbes article are the Australian Koala Foundation, not academics who study koalas.

As I say, I'm reluctant to bring this up because it may sound like I'm deliberately trying to diminish the importance of habitat destruction on koalas, which is clearly serious. But the headline for me feels like Forbes chose the most emotive possible interpretation to gain some clicks, rather than it being a sober analysis of the (clearly serious) situation, and therefore I'm doubtful of the "functionally extinct" part of this.

The reason I'm quibbling is that if this claim is over-stated, it's going to lead to people thinking "well, last time they said functionally extinct it wasn't true, so it probably is this time," and will make these kinds of claims easier to dismiss in the future.
Library being discussed: https://github.com/StediInc/cdk-clj
You can't optimize well enough if your abstraction layer is too far away from your application layer.
Yes, that would be possible, though I think it should rendered to a totally separate page to avoid confusion. I didn't realize URLs were edited here, so it was off my radar till now :)
I’m sorry about your condition. Compared to that, my problems are insignificant.

I try from time to time to code something... I’ve been learning F# lately. I force myself to sit in front of computer and do something, anything.

But, somehow everything is tainted by the thought of going to “the pit” in the morning. I don’t know how to overcome that - to disconnect when I leave office.
I disagree. Wallets exist that are as easy to use (for small sums) as Venmo.

I stopped using Bitcoin for daily transactions because of the stress of having to report every coffee purchase on my tax return.
You're not exactly wrong, but you are kinda wrong if you judge based on the which bed length is most commonly purchased by consumers (as opposed to contractors). On almost any dealer lot, you'll find maybe 1 8' bed, and it'll probably be a base model 1/2 or 3/4 ton with a bench seat, perhaps 90% 5.5' bed trucks, mostly in luxury trim, and a small handful (if you're lucky) of 6/5' bed trucks.

The drivability of a 6.5 vs 5.5 is huge because of the turning radius resulting from the longer wheelbase. Most people don't want to have to think about where they can park.
More like 100M * 100 = 10 B < Gates
I mean sure, to an extent everything involves society. However, what I'm suggesting is that instead of tackling the problem at hand (that you want drugs to be legal) you're suggesting creating tools that make funding anything impossible to stop.

You're not solving the actual problem by going out and convincing society you're right (and you are, the Portuguese model shows that full decriminalization and even legalization lead to much better outcomes and no material increase in usage).

You're convincing people to deploy magic bean producing power wasters that just happen to let you buy drugs. It doesn't help mitigate or undo the harm foisted upon the millions in US prisons who got there because they wanted drugs. It doesn't help bring about the downfall of the cartels. If anything, it props those things up.

> Writing code collaboratively and convincing thousands of people to run nodes replicating your slow database is a social act -- I'd even call it a political act.

Yes, in and of itself it is.

The social act is deploying a slow database, which in turn provides technological workarounds to the actual social issues (like drug policy) that should be tackled head-on.
I was fairly impressed with the PostgreSQL sources when I was poking through them once.
The number of projects using javascript as the primary language seems odd. I am not sure how they determine the primary language, but does anyone else think it may be skewed (larger) since many projects host their javascript libraries and often in both minimized and dev formats?
I still maintain that Facebook is, by design, anti-social.

Society is a balance between private and public activity (another HNer talked about warrens and commons).

When that balance is ignored, then the result is antisocial whether it over-promotes privacy or publicity.

Most people are not wanton socialites, but Facebook only caters those who are... the rest of us are just (taken) along for the ride.
Lots of people miss the "Play" button (top right of the map). It's worth pressing.
Obviously execution is critical; however, I cannot agree with you that everything else pales in comparison to execution. You can execute "successfully", but if what you build isn't something the client wants, then you're wasting your time.

Depending on what you're developing, a business side perspective could be invaluable. The financial services industry is full of inefficiency, as an example to illustrate my point. I worked in equity research for a while and we published reports that were simply pdfs of excel files (there are some publishing tools out there like bluematrix). There are huge opportunities here for a better publishing platform that is easy to use for someone who is not technologically savvy (like research analysts). Having someone with the insight into the industry could be very useful and would help a developer identify and focus on developing and designing functions that would be useful to the client. I'm sure more than one developer has wasted time developing something only to get FEEDBACK (also know as perspective) from the client (often business related when not a developer end-product) that the functionality doesn't match what they need or expect.

I just cannot agree with your point of view here. In my opinion, ideas and perspective are important, but then again, I am new to this. Can someone explain to me why execution should be held above all else?
I was impressed with this, which I saw (ironically) about 15 minutes after I posted my earlier comment:

http://ninjatune.net/article/2011/apr/19/amon-tobin-isam-ava...

This is the best response I've seen from a label to a leak yet.
Indeed, I'm reading this wondering how 400 connections could even crash a JVM on an OSX machine. It's surprising.

I suspect it's not a threading issue in the sense he's describing. 400 threads probably shouldn't give you an OOM unless your heap size is set perilously low (in which case just about everything will give you that error).

It's also painful to then see him argue that epoll/select/NIO is the magical path to freedom. Erlang and Akka developers are trying to to cry and laugh at the same time when they see this.
It's been years since I last read something from phrack, but I remember it being a huge inspiration to me back around their #50th issue. I was talking to a couple of guys during dinner a few days ago (one of them antirez, of Redis fame) and we noted about how serendipitous it was that all 3 of us had a background on compsec and reconnected many years later in a conference.

It's interesting to see that these things aren't dead and that people who care deeply about their craft (regardless of what craft that might be) actually succeed. I kinda wish today was a little more like the late 90s.

Now that we're in 2010, though, I kinda wish this stuff was instapaper-able (I'm curious about what these guys are publishing these days). I know we're talking about Phrack, but there's no real reason why this looks and feels like 1986. (as an aside: .tar.gz link is dead. Was going to make a pdf version of this to put on the ipad.)
I mean the whole thing is ridiculous, yes. OpenIds should have been names and not URLs from the start.
Phrack is still writing the same things that you could find there 15 years ago, when it was great. Now it is not anymore I fear.
To play a little devil's advocate, a lot of progress starts out with weapons. If we ever become a space-faring society, having more powerful weapons could possibly be a good thing. Space is big and we have no idea what's out there ( I'm not talking about aliens, but they could be there too. ) Though I do agree that as a terrestrial race, we have no need for weapons like this.
But that undermines the main point, which is to allow non-experts to evaluate the risks by using units they can understand. The general public does not understand Chernobyl Sheep; they DO understand bananas. If you say a leak was the equivalent of 200 bananas, then people can tell whether that's a reasonably size to be seriously concerned about.
thanks for the tip .. i'll definitely try and do the same once I'm comfortably re-acquainted with wordpress and possibly drupal..
I also have this problem. I spent a large part of the weekend creating a tool for my developers at work to make their live easier instead of spending those precious minutes with my wife and 8 month old sweet girl.

Some argue that we already spend time on what is important to us. If it wasn't important, than we wouldn't be spending time on it. In my case, my work is more important than my family at times. In yours, the argument would go, having fun is more important that pursuing your "dream".

I think it takes a lifestyle change. A rehash of what is _actually_ important to us and redirecting our attention and energy to that.

Good luck, oz. I hope you make it!
pretty spot-on patio11.
Playing is kind of possible today with some hacks, though you would need time signatures on the tab.

I think we're going to move towards the browser as a music composition tool soon, and I can't wait. Some people at Mozilla are working on an awesome audio data api spec, check out their demos/videos: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Audio_Data_API
umm you said: "I don't want to waste my life, waking up @ 30 wondering where the years have gone." OUCH!

I am 32, turning 33 this coming Sunday and I think my best years are ahead of me. I tried hard to in my twenties, but twenty-something distractions got in the way. First wife, three kids, divorce, working hard to gain an inch.

Not I have wised up, refined my work habits, learned from my mistakes (even the ones I repeated twice), found a woman that "gets" entrepreneurship and I am doing better than ever.

When I am 40, I am going to be able to relax, listen to music on my deck while holding my wifes hand and not worrying about my future.

Ask me when I was 23 and I would not had this same response.
Related:
http://radian.org/notebook/porsche
I don't know why you're being downmodded- you were right to point this out. Thank you.

Someone who can: please fix the title, per the guidelines.

If you submit a link to a video or pdf, please warn us by appending [video] or [pdf] to the title.
I work in the US. At my last workplace, the datacenter levels had booths called "man-traps" as their entryway. You enter the booth on one side, then swipe your card to authenticate. Then the door opens on the other side. If you can't authenticate, you stay inside.
>There's an almost pathological compulsion here to analyze every word and sentence, hoping for some incisive way to show one's cleverness. I think that's missing the point.

It's a pathology of the community, yes. People here just aren't all that nice, and the popularity contest centers around demonstrated intellect and rhetoric.

Too bad it doesn't center around productivity, such as she mentions in her post.
In an interview, he said the most implausible / impossible thing in the book was actually the very first scene when there is a storm that can knock things over.
Only comment is that keeping your money in cash instead of invested for a 5 year horizon isn't wise. Put them in something on the safer side - I'm not saying buy Bitcoin or something - but that's a long time to have your money not be working for you at all. Interest rates at way below inflation.
Indeed! :-) FWIW, the "defer" functionality is implemented as the LEAVE phaser in Raku: https://docs.raku.org/language/phasers#index-entry-Phasers__...
It will be interesting to see if Microsoft follows a Yahoo like trajectory - and if Apple follows Microsoft's trajectory after a few years of Tim Cook.
What were the key Ballmer era highlights?

== Negatives ==

* Clashes with Gates during CEO transition of power: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121261241035146237.html

* Developer relations / motivational speaking (thanks mathattack): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wvsboPUjrGc

* Employee retention (thanks JonnieCache, Ziomislaw): http://www.smh.com.au/news/technology/microsoft-ceo-im-going...

* Windows Phone: http://www.forbes.com/sites/markrogowsky/2013/07/18/if-you-h...

* IPTV platform Microsoft Mediaroom (thanks nixy): http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/02/03/bt_vision_upgrade/

* Vista (thanks balakk, danieldk)

* Internet Explorer neglect and market share declines.

== Mixed ==

* Failed Yahoo acquisition (thanks michaelpinto, seanmcdirmid, throwaway1979): http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/news/press/2008/may08/05-03le...

== Positives ==

* Xbox / games division (thanks benihana)

* Enterprise successes (thanks gregd, facorreia)

* Facebook investment (thanks riffraff)

[edits: updates per reply comment suggestions]
I don't think Ballmer was a crap CEO, but because many people think he is, therefore just the fact he leaves is good for the company.
I wouldn't want it to be too thick, but I have to agree that a quality keyboard is SUPER important. At the very least, 2mm travel is much nicer than 1.5mm.
And because it's modular, they might as well add a programmable ortholinear option! It would be a first in the laptop world, and may actually be successful due to the rising popularity of ergonomics.

Maybe the 2mm ortho could have standard qwerty labels printed on the side of the keycaps, so it's not as obnoxious when people bind different layouts or macros.

If I were to buy one, I would also buy the 15" version. Old thinkpads are awesome.
When I give homework projects, they are extracted from a previous part of the interview: What is a personal project that you’ve wanted to do but haven’t had time to do? Then I just ask them to do that. Win / win.
I live in a developing country. There are 13 million people in the city I live in. While it is starting to change, effectively nobody but the pretty rich owns a car. (A car is $20,000 and up, whereas average annual salaries are more like $7,000.)

Yet somehow those millions of families get by just fine without cars. I'm not sure why you think it is complete impossible.
Well, if you ever need to use some software you lost the license to after legitimately purchasing it, a lot of .ir websites have very good selections of ways around that for almost any software you can imagine.

That goes with sanctions; as a result the Iranian warez scene is actually vital to their economy.