skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
(Full disclosure: I definitely fall under the real programmer category)

I agree with about 90% of what the author said. However, I don't know that I agree that the "dudes" and "real programmers" shouldn't work on a project together. In fact, I think it's good for them to be in a state of healthy conflict.

I also would dispute that the "real programmer" would be more productive than the "dude". The real programmer would probably outperform the dude in terms of sheer amount of code written, but the dude is likely to get more done.

I think that the ultimate product would be that the dude would actually get the product done and the programmer would make a higher-quality product that won't fall apart at the slightest change.
I disagree ... that's the equivalent of say leaving your front door open and not worrying about being robbed because there are 300 million doors in the city.

Sure you are unlikely to be targeted specifically, but once someone has decided to commit identity theft, you don't want to be the easy target.

And 10 FB users or 300 million is kinda irrelevant with all the automated tools/scripts that are available these days - searching for the 1 vulnerable person out of 300 million is a relatively trivial task. They will 'stumble' upon your profile not because they randomly picked you from 300 million, but because they ran a script that identified you as an easy target.
It doesn't make things better that tarsnap works only on linux of course. (If I remember correctly?)

Linux, BSD, Solaris, OS X, and Cygwin. Probably other UNIXy OSes too, but I don't know anyone using AIX or Tru64.

Tarsnap doesn't support Windows (except via a POSIX layer like Cygwin) or GNU Hurd.
Hi there. Typical workday is wake up at 7, get my kid ready and take him to school, than back to the office (home) at around 9:30. Work until 6:00pm, then family time again, then put the kid to bed at around 9:30, then work again until 12:00-12:30. It's a lot, but I can take a morning or a night off pretty often. Mariah only works on Balsamiq maybe an hour or two a day, Marco's workday is about 9:30 to 5:30, and Valerie's workday is...actually, I don't really know! It seems like she's always working! :)
The point of this service is not to contact you. If they already have the e-mails, then they won't need this service; they will e-mail/spam you anyway. It's in place because...

> Such information can help you correct course before you are too invested in a particular idea you have.
Not yet. I'm thinking about it.

EDIT: Ok, finished thinking. Let's see how much traffic $20 gets me.
Since you're not the first to say this in the comments to the post, I simply must surrender and at least review the point - indeed it might be good for the project to have both people on the team. But I suppose only when both have certain qualities. What do you think those qualities are? And when does the team of 2 different types outperform the team of equal types?
my definition of popularity is the form portrayed in mainstream media and films ... e.g., student council officers, athletes, cheerleaders

you bring up a good point, though. the popular kids are actually in the minority at school; there are far more unpopular kids than popular kids. so there will likely be more people who like death metal, computer games, etc. than the 'popular' activities.
Everybody knows that part of their facebook is viewable to the world

No, that was a CHANGE in Facebook's policies after at least 200 million people had signed up. Some of those things can no longer be changed to be private.
This might be of interest:

http://publications.gbdirect.co.uk/c_book/
Probably, it's illegal at every EU country which implements the 95/46/EC directive(http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=CELEX:...)
I submit that the author is not finely attuned to teen boys' fashion in his area, and so presumes the nerds are dressed just as "well" as the popular guys. The difference can be made by the smallest things: shoe brand, specific hair style, etc. I know by my age, I'm blind to such differences in that age group.

Also, I object to framing the "popular" situation to be so simple. I was definitely a nerd in school but, like the guys in the post, had a group of friends and my own activities. The popular kids were definitely a different group, but they weren't better than us. It's not a linear ordering of groups.
the part that acares me the most is that he is willing to go around giving the list to anyone
Doubtful. Medical and pharmaeutical research is done either by private companies or by universities and such.
2. There's a shortage of doctors in America

To the contrary, the United States has an unusually high number of medical doctors per 100,000 persons in the population. Economist Martin Feldstein discovered a long time ago, in comparative studies of the United States and Britain, that doctors refer patients to other doctors, so that increasing the percentage of doctors in a country can actually result in more use of medical treatments per patient without any improvement in patient outcomes. After he made this discovery, the United States figured out that promoting the opening of more and more and more medical schools was not going to result in doctors serving underserved areas such as isolated rural areas. (Doctors like to live in communities similar to where their spouses are accustomed to live, as other studies have found.)

The other suggestions in the parent comment have been carefully considered by policy makers around the world and have been found to be policies with some ill trade-offs as well as good, and not just in the United States.
Google's obsession with data-driven decision making results in successful products that have no soul.
You Should Waste 50% of Your Time
In the rest of the world there are not the restrictions on drugs that are found in the USA.

I have lived overseas long enough that I have been treated by licensed medical doctors in another country, who prescribed to me drugs that are not permitted in the United States. That was not a happy experience. I eventually had to have FDA-approved drugs that ACTUALLY WERE SAFE AND EFFICACIOUS sent over to me as I continued my stay in that country. There are prescribing and dispensing biases in other countries that frequently cause the most safe and effective medicines to not even be available in those countries at any price, even long after FDA approval of the best medicines in the United States.
I think that both groups always outperform each other and are always behind each other at the same time. It's that the two groups are really working towards different goals. The dude will likely want to get a product out as quickly as possible. The real programmer will want to make something that will be maintainable and good to work on in the long-term. I think this is why you will see conflict often between the two groups if you're not careful.

Personally, I think that the key is understanding. Both types need to recognize that the other is working towards a valid goal and that sometimes the other's goal is more important. Otherwise, you end up with two people who wonder why they never agree on anything.
Great observation.

> Facebook should allow you to 'friend' a business

That has the same connotations to me, how about "follow"
Peldi, I blogged about you sometime at the beginning of last year. At that time you was already at about 10K in sales if I recall.

I'd be interested (and I am sure others would too) if you could do a post about the successful marketing techniques which have worked for you. I.e. what proportion of new clientele comes from your sponsorships of events Vs any advertising you do etc. etc...

The main problem most people I assume find is they run into a plateau of sales where it levels off, whereas you have gone like a rocket - so more on where your traffic is coming from would be great.

How about opening up your stats? (I know your all for openness's) would this be a step too far?
That text is pretty long, can you summarize the parts relevant to this for us?
The 3 phases of the web: browsing, searching, recommending.
I think having a gui for OS X could really help it to spread.. I'd love to recommend tarsnap to friends but most of them don't want to use the commandline
Scatterplots are usually necessary to check correlations. See

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_and_dependence

for a famous set of example scatterplots first designed by a statistician warning students of commonplace errors in interpreting correlation coefficients.
1. I doubt the effect of this is as strong as you seem to think, but ok.

2. There's a reluctance to allow doctors educated elsewhere to practice without undergoing a rigorous accreditation process of some sort in nearly every country in the world except possibly in some of the most destitute third world countries. This isn't unique to the US.

3. All over the world doctors have to train for at least 8 years or so before they can practice. Again, not unique to the US.

4. There's a reason for that. It means the worst quackery is kept off the market. I'd say that's a good thing (also, it's not unique to the US, although the FDA is indeed a world leader in its stringency). Note, however, that the entire world is using (and paying for!) drugs that have been through the rigorous FDA testing process, so again this is not a reason why medical care in the US is more expensive than in the rest of the world.
There are companies who make money by scaring you about identity theft. But personally, I just don't think it is a valid concern. Stealing your identity is soemthing that has always been possible, but only nowadays is there some type of hullaboo about it. I just cannot see it happening so often and being such a big problem for me to bother about it.

But it's just my opinion, I don't actually know. Maybe one day when I'm being carted away for ordering a million grandma porn videos without paying, I will realise the error of my ways...
Follow works even better. Now all we need is someone from Facebook to take part in this conversation...
Don't know how about you, but I find http://gomockingbird.com way better and attractive. It doesn't use flash, it has pretty controls and generally a better UI with tiny little details like, say, aligning the elements relatively to each other. But still, since they are profitable (good for them) and make that much money, there's probably a need for such services on the market.
Love the tool, but the price is a bit high for my limited startup wallet :) I especially like the Confluence integration.
I did. The point still stands.

It's akin to how people say that we need Mexicans in the country, because who else is going to do the farming? You can declare a group of people both necessary and inferior all in the same sentence.
You managed to offend me here, but not for the reasons you think. I have two very close friends who are transgender, one of whom got transitional surgery less than a week ago, so you can go fuck yourself.
I'd love to hear about how this turns out for you.
well, civilizations die to be replaced by new ones all the time you know.

whether we can overcome deeply fundamental crisis our western civilization faces remains to be seen, but looking back at 2000-2009 i am not convinced.
I was definitely a nerd in school but, like the guys in the post, had a group of friends and my own activities. The popular kids were definitely a different group, but they weren't better than us. It's not a linear ordering of groups.

totally agree, i had the same experience in high school. i hope i didn't imply in my article that there is a linear ordering of groups (i haven't read it over in a long time).

in my high school, the nerds were often comfortable in their own skin (and had deep interests that could engage them), but the majority of kids in high school aren't nerds and aren't popular either ... they're somewhere in between. those are the kids who strive to become popular and have all sorts of angst because many fail to achieve that goal.
3 Ways to Lose Weight Quickly
another suggestion is to start shipping binaries. i just looked at your download page and while it's not much of an issue for me to compile it, it may be just enough work to make other people not want to try it. especially when you start talking about header files and dependency versions.

make deb and rpm packages, get it into the freebsd/openbsd/pkgsrc/fink port trees. make your installation page as short as "pkg_add tarsnap" and only link to the compilation instructions for other, less commonly used architectures. (do you have the ability to see what os/arch most of your users are using?)
Is program proving viable and useful?
It's only a feature if the computer is a bomb. (Or if someone pressed the self-destruct button.)
Smart phone apps can find you, follow you
Meet the lipstick entrepreneur
C'mon, Gruber wrote the exact same thing 4 days ago. And there are other "web surfing on the toilet?" quotes from Jobs scattered all over the blogosphere.

It looks like we've broken the Mach 1 barrier in hype and are now designing the project for Apple instead of just sitting back and speculating wildly.
The writer misused the word "actionable" and my eyes rolled back so far in my head I couldn't finish reading it.
Binaries are on my to-do list. I could build a bunch of binaries and put them on the website right now, but I want to have a scriptable build process before I commit to providing binaries.

FWIW, Tarsnap is in the FreeBSD ports tree already, but not in others.
Daniel Suarez - Daemon: Bot-Mediated Reality
The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions
Californians have the opportunity to fix state
Ludicrous Bear Story, We Don't Get the Net
Startup Engineers: Learning the Core
crypted off-site backups? wait, people pay for that? wtf, crashplan is free (forever). all you need is a buddy with some disk. a tb is about a hundred bucks these days.

good luck with that tarsnap thingy.
Probably not... re-fueling is a very time-intensive process. (The reactors I worked on were designed to be re-fueled every 25-30 years.)

250 tons for a 1 gigawatt constant output seems more likely to me.
I thought this was going t be about productivity gains through idle time. It's actually about spending half your time self promoting. It's directed toward researchers, but it applies equally to anyone producing output. The point: do good work, but also promote it or it'll never see the light of day.
Thanks for the suggestions, I've started to move us to Helvetica (except logos for now) and cut down on italics. Do you have a site, twitter etc.? my details are in my profile.
Corollary might be "the spherical nurses in the cardiac unit are the ones most likely to lecture you on the importance of losing weight and a healthy diet".

I accompanied a close friend to the local hospital to get some tests done (EKG, etc). Virtually all the nurses were such that you couldn't any part of the chair they were sitting on except the back of the seat.
I guess the one thing that matters is getting to date a pretty girl, who would most likely belong to the in-crowd.

But still, if you were in a Death Metal Band, at least you would have some nice things to remember about High School.
I'm not going to make any assertions about anyone's experience. If you would like to see the Smalltalk debugger in action without trying the environment, have a look at the videos here (each is in the 2-5 minute range):

http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/userblogs/cincom/blogView?con...
Well, if your instructor is good at running the class you shouldn't be getting hurt any more than incredibly sore from using new muscles and some scrapes and bruises. Nothing broken or torn unless you aren't paying attention. Most of the time you cause your own injuries through stupidity.

That being said, martial arts is a chance to learn about fighting and the pain and suffering it causes in a controlled environment. That's something most men these days never learn, which you can see by how they threaten and insult people on sites like this.

For martial arts to study, you'll obviously be limited by your geographic region and what's available. Honestly, you should just try a whole bunch and see what you like and if you like the instructor or not. Good ones to try are boxing, judo, aikido, shorin-ji kempo, wing tsung, and most forms of karate.

I'd avoid MMA (Mixed Martial Arts) unless you want to hang out with roid juiced douche bags with no sense of honor.

In your case, I'd start with either aikido, judo, or shorin-ji kempo. All three of these teach non-violence, are very structured, effective, designed for small people, and generally run as non-profits or taught at universities. I recommend judo especially for women.

Finally, you need to avoid scams more than pick a good martial art. To be honest, at your level just about anything will help, but if you pick a bad instructor you'll be in more trouble than if you picked a incompatible martial art.

When you meet your instructor, if he's immediately trying to sign you up for long term contracts or sell you shit, then walk away. If he talks in religious terms, or talks too much, then walk away. Meditation is great, preaching is not. If he makes claims that are "magical" then walk away. Floating, levitating, mind control, are all bullshit. Ki, chi, "energy" are fairly common and alright. If it feels like a religion and the students don't think for themselves, it's a cult walk away. If you get "love bombed" when you first walk in, it's a cult, walk away. If there are tons of belts walk away. If you see the instructor get his ass kicked by a student then don't bother.

Picking a good teacher is far more important than picking a "good martial art". If it feels like a scam, then just trust your gut and avoid it.
this definitely deserves an entirely new submission on Hacker News.
Canadian diet patterns are significantly different from those in the US. As of 2004, Canada had an obesity rate of 23.1%. The corresponding rate in the US (circa 2005) was 34%.

The big difference here is probably racial. Table 3 of my first link suggests white Canadians are only a little thinner than white Americans. But blacks, particularly black women, are considerably fatter than average. They make up about 12% of the US and 2% of Canada.

http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/82-620-m/2005001/article/adults...

http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/82-620-m/2005001/article/adults...
There's a little-known world of commercial services like Rapleaf that give marketers information from a list of email addresses. I wrote a test service to show you what information's available on your address:

http://petewarden.typepad.com/searchbrowser/2009/12/what-can...

The scary thing is that if they can get your full name and rough location, it's then often possible to get a full address (see whitepages.com for a consumer-facing example). That then ties into other datasets that have information on income, occupation, marital status, etc for every household in the US.
>Some of those things can no longer be changed to be private.

Which things?
Case in point: ESR's how to be a hacker.
Explore dual-licensing options for the daemon, too. Tarsnap is the kind of thing that could become a ubiquitous sysadmin tool, if done right!
The mobile site is not actually a more pleasant reading experience.
Thoughts On Becoming Self-Sufficient and Defeating Personal Homelessness
We'll have to agreee to disagree then. I'm not so shallow on the appearance part, that's just your sexism.
Something tells me improving the website design would make a difference. Just saying, boss, just saying.
Why the downvote? Disagreement? Do you think GMail actually has soul?
You Are Not a Gadget
NASA uses GIT as the SCM for their Open Projects
Ephedrine and Its Use In Weight Loss
Points 28, 38, 39 may apply here. I haven't studied this directive but its spanish implementation(IANAL, but if you work with personal data you need to know how to comply), and under that law, users should be asked for explicit permission unless Facebook had stated to them beforehand that they could transfer their data to a third party for a particular purpose at the time of the collection of the data. In that case, there should be a signed contract between both parties (Facebook and you), which states the purpose and duration of the treatment of the data. After that treatment, the third party should destroy that since it's not authorized to use it anymore.

Anyway, as everyone here knows, its pretty hard to enforce this kind of law.
Ask HN:  Where is the Tivo social network?
For many years now I've been wondering when the Tivo social network would show up. Why hasn't Tivo, DirecTV, Comcast, someone with the content built one?

http://blog.louisgray.com/2008/06/tivo-is-zero-on-social-web-its-time.html
Good tips. I must add that I would not count on them knowing what they are doing. They may get you something usable but it usually won't be good practices. See the comment above about unfiltered SQL statements in the GET requests. If you don't know why that is a bad thing then when you get the code back from the people and it has this type of huge security error you will not know what to look for.

That being said I think there is a fair bit of work that can be safely outsourced to these people without too much fear of security. PSD to HTML slicing, etc.... But the old adage applies that you get what you pay for.
Indeed, politics is the mind killer. - http://lesswrong.com/lw/gw/politics_is_the_mindkiller/
You cannot make your friends list private from your friends or friends friends anymore. If you had this turned on, it was switched off.
What sounds most familiar to me in both this article and Paul Graham's, is that, for the most part, nerds ("we") see through the game and decide it's not worth the attention. I spent the last 3 years (out of 6 here in NL) playing a game with my mother. Every day she would ask if I learned something new, I would reply with "no".

Unfortunately, college here works about the same.
Twitter is useless compared to Facebook. You get a lot more engagement from Facebook.

With twitter your window of opportunity is the 5 seconds that you show up in their feed. With Facebook that time is a lot longer.

You can have 10,000 followers on twitter, but only 20 people will see your announcement, since you'll show up in their feed for 5 seconds.

Anyone who follows a business account on Twitter, is most likely following more than 100 people(and most likely >1000), which means you are one of hundreds of people trying to talk to them
Someone else can check the ToS and privacy notice, but if I remember correctly sex and religion went to world-viewable by default if they are specified on the profile at all.

After edit: "The Ugly: Information That You Used to Control Is Now Treated as 'Publicly Available,' and You Can't Opt Out of The 'Sharing' of Your Information with Facebook Apps"

http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/12/facebooks-new-privacy-c...
How to Crack the Self-Awareness Paradigm
Hey Peldi,

Congrats. I've read your marketing advice in your blog. Do you have any other tips for small software companies getting their product reviewed or mentioned in the press / blogs ?

Cheers
It is only unethical if you assume that most people don't understand Facebook and privacy controls.
How come you didn't include website traffic stats like you did last year?
fair enough, I may have over done it
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Totally forgot, but it's also an indication of how little time I spend looking at them. What stats are you interested in? I can look them up for you.
Hi samh, I revisited my old blog post as part of this interview: http://blog.asmartbear.com/balsamiq-studios-uncommon-intervi... - I hope it will be helpful! :)
Anthropogenic Biomes: A Framework for Ecology & Earth Science
Scientists say dolphins should be treated as 'non-human persons'
You seem to forget Maemo. Of course it doesn't have Google to do the marketing, but other than that I don't see why Android would be any better than it.