skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Programming Doesn’t Suck Or At Least, It Shouldn’t
While Lojban is "logical", human language is not. Or rather, it is, but it follows its own set of (well defined) rules. If Lojban does not follow these rule's, it's not truly learnable, and thus irrelevant. If Lojban _does_ follow these rules, and is genuinely learnable, then it offers little advantage except perhaps a pared down vocabulary that avoids ambiguity and redundancy, and a less flexible morphology and syntax. Assuming the latter, human languages change naturally, in order to facilitate learning and communication, and Lojban would change too, if actually used. Metaphor, ambiguity, imprecision, etc. all are the _products_ of language adapting itself to suit our needs better. So for all the "flaws" of natural languages, they work, and work well, and if Lojban were adopted by people, it would end up looking like a natural language, with all their "flaws". And that's a good thing.
Battling the information barbarians
"google blocked old browsers in favor of html5"

Why is this a negative thing? The old browsers are a pain in the ass and the web will be far richer once they are gone and new ones replace them.
Maybe someone can solve that hard problem while they're at it?

Leverage whatever's keeping HN relatively spam-free.
I was thinkin that same thing, Im sure you can find good online resources for any language.
In California an LLC pays a franchise tax on gross revenue that SubS is not subject to (in addition to all of the fees that both owe) Unless you have foreign nationals as founders SubS is probably preferable in California.
Dr. Edmund Weitz: The Power Of Lisp Macros
We could make it like doostang, so you need to have somebody invite you in order to make an account
> Lojban unleashes the full potential of poetic expression

Whoever wrote that is lying to himself and others. Please refer to my lower post (the one containing "wherefore art thou Romeo?") for a partial but sufficient explanation.
Look up Asperger's.
If you are serious about start ups (as in you want to accomplish something big), you should move to SV. Outside of SV, it's hit or miss (maybe your current start up will work, if it doesn't maybe you hit on the next one). If you move out to SV, you'll realize there is an ecosystem and an industry for you to 1) have a career and 2) meet people that are passionate about the industry and are like minded and 3) yes, you'll see more and be exposed to more and different parts of the industry (there are co's out here doing great in areas you'd never normally be exposed to).

But if you want lifestyle, Australia is probably great. If you want to be on the world stage, well, SV is it.
Seems to me putting a karma requirement on posting, and requiring X up-votes before it gets to the main job page would solve that problem.
Why not post the link to the interview itself:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/31/business/31corner.html

The guidelines say:

> Please submit the original source. If a blog
> post reports on something they found on another
> site, submit the latter.

( from http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html )
Well, isn't that called a "general-purpose programming language"?
you know you are looking at the "height" of debating art when prodigious analogies are drawn between the topic at hand and Hitler.
A visit to the front page of this wacky site reveals an "interesting" selection of topics:

- Israeli Mind-scanner May Take Over US Airports
- The Obama Administration's Cover-up of the Flight 253 Affair
- The Terror Card: Fear is the Key to Obedience
- CIA chief holds secret talks with Egypt, Israel
- Presidential Assassinations of US Citizens
Fed pushes interest rates far below natural levels --> flood of easy credit into the hands of those who, regardless of work ethic, merit as human beings, etc., just can't afford it --> loans don't get paid back --> banks don't have the money they should --> credit flow halts entirely --> everything goes to shit
The tech companies, by not paying out dividends, are in effect telling shareholders that they can invest the profits better than them.

This belief I guess comes out in part due to the meteoric profit growth that successful tech companies witness which leads to hubris in the management. The other reason for this belief is the shareholders themselves who let management invest profits in any project they want in the hope of ever increasing profits and stock price.

About microsoft's dividends, one thing the article misses is that msft's payout is very high but most of it is via stock repurchases.
The reality is that managements of all companies - tech or otherwise - concentrate on their own interests. That is why you see companies spending so much on stock repurchases rather than pure dividends. In theory it reduces the number of shares - but in practice it is a device to prop up the stock price so stock options or stock price linked benefits for employees and management are profitable. Microsoft spends disproportionately higher on stock repurchases compared to dividends. If they paid all that money as dividends, it would be a very decent dividend paying company.
HTML5 is not a valid alternative to Flash. Sure, there is some overlap between them, but there are way more differences.

It's (like so much else) like comparing an apple to an orange.
The thing I remember most about Apple ][ is the friendly manual and the shiny,shiny hardware. Wide open, waiting for you to do your mods with a smile... the Woz way.
This is nothing new; I personally am not old enough to have seen such things happen before but I am assured by my elders and betters it is just the next iteration.

keep the faith. :)
-1 for that? Wow.
I think job boards are pretty boring ... they seem to be the fallback business plan these days for any site where adsense doesn't make enough...
Here's why I'm not worried about an Amazon monopoly (I'm open to changing my mind on this).

1) It's not really a monopoly as long as the authors/publishers sell through other vendors too. Will I buy eBooks from Amazon, Apple, Barnes and Noble, Sony, or someone else (Wal-mart has to be at least thinking about it)? They're not here yet, but I expect to see eBook readers that work with multiple stores. I'm sure the iPad will through apps like the Kindle app for the iPhone.

2) Lock-in through DRM isn't nearly as much of an issue as it is with music because I don't re-read books more often than one book per decade. I have a handful of books that I re-reference every once in a while, but it's rare. I can switch my supplier very easily if someone comes out with a better device.

I have a lot of freedom to choose both the store and the reader (not complete, but a lot). As long as the stores don't require exclusive contracts, I think we'll be OK.
I scanned the article, found no bullet points and no sentence that grabbed my attention enough to read.

As much as I normally respect Volcker, this paper gets an "F" as a "How To".
Whatever. Democratic fallacy realized. Moving on with my life.
The iPad is revolutionary, and the apps will be the reason why.
The argument seems sound to me, except that a company like Apple is such a great counter example. In 1997, Michael Dell was famously quoted when asked about what should be Done with Apple (a company that Steve Jobs had _just_ returned to)

"What would I do?" Mr. Dell said to an audience of several thousand information technology managers. "I'd shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders."

The rest, is as well all know, history - Apple became worth more than Dell in 2006, and today, is worth almost six times as much as Dell.

I'm pretty certain Apple investors are happy that Apple didn't start issuing dividends and run the company on its (by then dying) Mac OS 8.x, but decided to completely reinvent itself on NeXT OS (aka OS X).

An anecdote, but a useful one.
Quick question from a noob: why do references make it harder to make a fast implementation? I'm genuinely interested in the topic, could you post a link to your PhD thesis or some other relevant information?
Cheers
> I don't understand Apple's blocking of the Google Voice app; that doesn't seem to help Apple in any way.

It was supposedly at the behest of AT&T which makes sense. None of the cellular carriers want to let their lucrative voice business get cannibalised by all you can eat data plans.
So form your business elsewhere. It's true that some states are more friendly to small businesses than others, but generally the reasoning holds true. If that's not enough, you could always pick up shop and shift your nexus to another state.

It's really up to the owners judgment, but a significant franchise tax bill on a small business might be preferred over the additional administrative requirements for running an S corp. At least in the former scenario, you are bringing in some nice revenue.

[UPDATE: here's some info on California S corp vs. LLC: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S_corporation#California.2C_New...]
Well, that's funny, I also worked in the amazon for several months at a time, away from the internet (in eastern ecuador). I can't say I missed it -- no, I couldn't browse the web, but I also didn't have to deal with email and cell phone calls about stupid stuff. In that sense it was quite liberating.

It gave me a new perspective on my online life, and how much time I used to waste on stupidity like Facebook, for instance.
"I'm, frankly, stunned that you believe that small business "don't spend that much on compliance". I spend about two days a month on it for our three-man company; that's more than 13% of my productivity gone to keeping us out of trouble with the government. Given that the other two people are part-time employees, it's about 6% of our entire available work. You consider that small, when it does nothing for our business' growth or for our customers?"

I consider it far less than a single full-time job, or even a part-time job. Even if you could eliminate all of this overhead (which you can't), you wouldn't be able to hire a new employee with the savings.

Look, if you think my argument is that the tax code shouldn't be simple, you're not reading me correctly. Low compliance costs should always be the goal. But when Mark Cuban says "reduce small business taxes to fix the economy", I think he's wrong. It won't move the needle on hiring, because in 99% of the businesses that matter for employment, hiring is limited by consumer demand, not corporate taxes.
Translated meaning isn't enough? So I suppose all those translations of Shakespeare in to hundreds of human languages isn't enough either; and anyone who claims Shakespeare can be appreciated in anything but English is just "lying to himself and others" (as you said in an earlier post).

Sure, any young language isn't going to have a rich history of expressions weighed down with meaning. But I don't think that has anything to do with whether the language is deliberately invented or not. With time, assuming the language is used by a significant number of people, it will acquire such a history.

Still, while young languages don't have a rich history compared to older languages, they have other advantages (of which Lojban has plenty).

Also remember that the history that has accrued to older languages is a double-edged sword. Because of this "baggage" it's sometimes difficult to express precisely what you mean without being misunderstood (or perhaps to even know what you mean -- see the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis). Lojban is designed to help overcome such difficulties.

The other thing to note is that the weighty phrases like "wherefore art thou Romeo?" aren't used very much in everyday speech. It's not like we go around constantly quoting Shakespeare at one another (except occasionally for effect, or humor). We generally communicate using rather simple language and concepts that should have no problem being expressed in even a young (but expressive) language like Lojban.
EMC do some cool stuff with flash/fibre channel/sata storage arrays with software that automatically moves data between the layers as needed, I'm sure I _need_ one of these for my media server:
http://www.emc.com/products/detail/hardware/symmetrix-v-max....

(in that "I _need_ a pony" kind of way...)
HTML 5 pocket reference
"apple is refusing to support flash in favor of html5"

I would argue Apple is not allowing Flash because it has the speed and graphics ability to compete with native apps (which Apple are monetizing).

Apple are ambivalent to HTML5 - on the one hand it improves the browser experience, but on they other they have been slow to expose the location, accelerometer and touch functionality to the browser.

http://blog.wolfire.com/2010/01/Web-applications-on-the-iPad
I doubt that even Microsoft wants IE6 around at this point. Too much negative publicity compared to the eroding advantage of keeping the web semi-broken-ish. Grandma probably has upgraded already, or at least one of her grandkids did it for her on Thanksgiving. Corporate America is the only segment holding onto IE6 -- mostly due to poorly-written internal apps that don't work properly on modern browsers.
Apple was the company most responsible for the viability of the mobile Internet, with their focus on making WebKit in the first place, building on KDE, and then making it practical on a mobile device.
Well whatever the particular acrynms might be I find it hard to believe that British secret service agencies don't use near identical tactics to obtain information from other countries or organisations.
I hear it became harder for horses pulling buggies on city streets after the invention of the automobile. In general, there is always competition among new and old forms of technology, and there is always competition among business enterprises. A good book to read about the subject (which goes back before the invention of the automobile) is

http://www.econlib.org/library/Smith/smWN.html

Note that this is FREE and in the public domain. There are other online postings of the book.
The implementations may differ, but the main use-cases are the same. So it's like comparing an apple to an orange when you want to choose a healthy supplement to your diet ;)
Freelancers or outside firms can’t possibly deliver what you want because they don’t actually care about the product or the outcome

Actually that's not true. A lot of freelancers I know are very proud of and attached to the projects they work on.

Might be true for some others, like some of the overseas firms you'll find on elance who crank out insane amounts of code, but for individual freelancers my experience has been that they care a great deal about what they work on.
Hook up a smoke detector to turn off the roaster. If smoke doesn't clear in 1 minute, have it shoot off a fire extinguisher. Problem solved.
W.R.T. Flash....perhaps if Adobe had been a better benevolent dictator, there would not be this huge backlash. Still no 64bit Windows Flash client? [No, I'm not in favor of Flash, but Adobe certainly didn't try very hard to maintain its monopoly]
Detecting command failures in bash
This week in search 1/31/10 (very interesting Time/Life images)
Personally, I love seeing this stuff at work, and I don't feel a need to cheer on anyone in particular at the moment, as they all offer something of value.
I second all of this. As a general rule, if you don't know how you could live without something, it's probably a good idea to find out. You get a much better idea of how much you need it vs. how much you're just using it to kill time and distract yourself. You might even find that not having it makes you miserable, but at least you then know how miserable.
So instead of adobe being the monopolistic developer of tools for the successful flash platform , adobe should compete with everybody else on developing tools to html5?

This doesn't seem like a great business move, at least not before they tried everything they can to keep flash important.
So why not just make it so complex that every business needs to hire 100 accountants to overcome the red tape? Under your theory this seems like a plausible way to eliminate unemployment.

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

It's not a dislike of lawyers/accounts it's a desire to make things more efficient. Every cost that is paid is a lost opportunity to grow the business in a more productive direction. Even small losses in investment over time can make large differences.
Fusion's been occurring in other reactor designs since the 50's -- just not specifically in this particular reactor. High School kids have achieved fusion in their basement with Farnsworth Fusor type designs. It's not especially hard.

Breakeven, though, is a lot tougher.
Uberblic Release
A little long in the tooth, and mostly MSFT-style "brain teasers:" http://www.techinterview.org/index.html
This is really awesome! I'm still yet to see anybody from either side (seeking work or seeking workers) from New Zealand though... Are you out there!?!?
More valuable and affordable products, also known as competition.
I wanted to learn a little more about the company, so I clicked on the "about Mahalo" link at the bottom of most pages.

http://www.mahalo.com/mahalo

How many other web companies serve ads on their "about" page? It seems like a really odd thing to do.
I've freelanced for the last 10 years and I feel a lot of the points made there are scraping the barrel somewhat. You learn how to best deal with most of it in less than a year.

Strictly budgeting yourself should be on there, as it's very much a case of feast and famine when you're starting out.

However, the single most difficult thing about freelancing to this day, for me at least, is staying motivated. My best tip to avoid creative blocks is to choose your clients wisely to allow your focus to shift around as diverse an array of briefs within your field as you can manage so you remain fresh and full of good ideas.

Oh boy, did I ever learn that the hard way.
Eh.

The best way for Adobe to save it is to open source the plugin though I suspect the resulting fragmentation would be a hindrance as well. A certification process of some kind might be helpful in that regard though.

I'm sure there are patent and licensing issues getting in the way of such a move.
Parameters and percentiles
bit.ly is looking for dev interns in NYC this summer.

If you're ambitious, curious, and like the idea of big data and high traffic volumes, drop us a line at jobs @ bit.ly
The thing is, most business turnarounds keep turning.

Apple is a case of one success versus a universe of failures
I've had them a few months and have been wearing them more and more; but so far I'll still take sneakers to walk more than a mile on asphalt.

About your feet hurting in general, I used to have the same problem before I started taking omega-3 supplements. I hadn't expected that benefit at all.
"Put another way: Company X's stock is $100/share. They issue a 50 cent dividend. The stock price will go down to $99.50/share upon announcement. "

That statement is patently incorrect, in theory and in practice.

PRACTICE

The share price of companies that announce dividends every quarter has little immediate correlation to the dividend announced. In the long term, companies that consistently raise dividends year over year actually increase in value. (These are affectionately referenced as "dividend darlings" and are a focus of some investment strategies.)

THEORY

The purpose of a company is to make money. You do this by spending capital to create a product. Once you sell that product, you regain back the capital you invested in earnings. The goal is to eventually make back more money in earnings than what you invested in capital.

If I buy a bar in my neighborhood for, say, $100k, I would expect to make money back on it. If I worked hard to build a clientele and earned something like $30k a year from my customers (a spectacular return, by the way), then the bar would be earning money. I could then afford to pay some of that out to the shareholders - in this case, just me.

What your notion of dividends seems to be is a cannibalization of the equity present in the company. If the company has no product of intrinsic value, then yes, your example might hold true. In the bar example, you would believe that the bar is worth only $100k (the price I paid) and that any money I pay out would be coming out of that $100k. This would be true only if I did not work to get customers and therefore did not make any money over the year.

SUMMARY

For companies that provide value in the form of goods and services, the money you get out of it will be more than the money you put in. This frequently, and oftentimes should, take the form of dividend payments.

ALTERNATIVE

Having said all that, there are very legitimate reasons why tech companies do not pay out dividends, namely that they reinvest the profits in research and development to produce new and better products. I don't think anyone who bought Apple stock seven years ago is complaining about the lack.
I'm a semester away from graduating with a computer science degree in the Los Angeles area. I'm looking for any positions available that can be contract based and remotely worked (although I would be willing to come in for any any meetings here and there) I have programming experience for over 5 years, and currently do freelance web development. My email is: topqadmin [at] gmail [dot] com
Wow. Just...wow. Ugh.

Given all the posts on this forum, and even his direct participation in the discussion, I honestly thought that he would've recognized both the technical problems in Mahalo's content & linking stratagems as well as the hollow tenor of his words.

Sadly, no. More duplicitous ignorance and classic "PR framing" piece straight out Political Communications 101.

1. Couch direct criticism as "feedback". Do not directly apologize for any perceived or actual misdeeds as that is seen as an admission of purposeful dis-service and guilt.

2. Enumerate an ill-defined set of seemingly concrete, but very porous, actions to be enacted within an indefinite time frame. This overtly defines a 'scorecard', albeit one without any measurable boundaries for future compliance. In other words, the Overton Window is wide open.

3. Within the context of the response, inject positive spin on (any) tangentially related side-issue to serve as a defensive soundbite reservoir against any possible pointed questions within the limited time-windows of future radio and t.v. media interviews.

4. Make offers to "work more closely" with the opposite party, but exclusively on your turf/terms while (un)subtly highlighting your strengths and their weaknesses to continue business as usual. In this case, Aaron's individual "free" time & attention versus their "paid" team of developers.

5. Release "off-cycle" (e.g. late Friday, holidays, weekend) and in a forum where you can have as much control as possible in 'shaping the break' of the story as it makes its way through the media ecosystem.

This is just sad from every angle and, quite honestly, bumming me out. I wish I hadn't clicked on Hacker News this afternoon.
The reason that the Flash authoring tools work in a sane manner is because there is a single, consistent runtime that they target.

There is a vast graveyard of tools that tried to wrap html and javascript so you could make reasonable GUI authoring tools. To my knowledge they were all plagued by consistency and performance problems, or placed severe limits on what you could author.

This is less of a way forward than it is a pipe dream, no matter how promising Canvas looks.
No, from TFA “Application availability and pricing are subject to change. This device has not yet been authorized as required by the rules of the Federal Communications Commission. This device is not, and may not be, offered for sale or lease, or sold or leased, until authorization is obtained.”