skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Add in cheap Indians, replace "white hat" with "black hat" (comment spamming, etc), and make it massively parallel across tens of thousands of sites, and you have a lot of modern SEO operations on the seedier side of the tracks. Many of them are one-man operations (aside from the team of outsourcers). His job is strategic direction (identifying sources of keywords to build spam sites for, etc), conducting the outsourcing symphony, sometimes a bit of programming, and cashing the big checks.

On the less seedy side of the market Demand Media is essentially a corporation representing a collaborative endeavor between an AI and a million monkeys with typewriters.
For quite a while now, I really did feel that Joel has run out of things to say and stopped reading him. So this comes as no surprise (and no loss). His books are still good reads though. Wisdom is also something that is subject to evolution I guess.
this is the wal-mart/CVS solution which Hanson is a big fan of as well.
Seems like a transcript of the TV segment -- so compared to something that was written to be read, it's more informal, less substantial, more dependent on timing/delivery (which is lost in the transcript) for its effect on the listener.
Or, you know, we could just get rid of the filibuster. That would help a lot.
> Likewise, the government wasn't executing people for drinking alcohol; they were making death a likely consequence of drinking alcohol, but they were not performing executions.

It all depends on what you think is important, life or what the death certificate says.

If I engage in an act likely to result in someone's death, I'my guilty of manslaughter (or murder) except in certain circumstances. That's true whether or not I'm ever brought up on charges.
Technology made nail manufacturing more efficient, but the cost savings created new products to be manufactured. This phase of technological advancement will effectively eliminate manufacturing as a profession. The savings may lead to more new products, but robots will manufacture those too. It truly is a unique moment in history, which is why I think the lessons of the past may not apply.
Does that 60% figure include transmission losses, or is it just thermal efficiency? I'm guessing the latter.
sure, but we're talking about an ordered list of priorities. generally you'd expetct something along the lines of

myself

those closest to me

my "tribe"

my society

my species

similar species

less similar species

etc.
Has anyone read functional data structures that can give a brief review on it?
Hey, I'm in same position, but haven't yet switched to the Dark Side. Can you contact me at bettingbrandon at hotmail dot com I'd love to ask you a few questions about your experiences. Can't seem to figure out a way to message you directly on HN, thanks.
I've used both Sequel and Active Record. I like Active Record when working with a brand new Rails-ish database, but for working with anything else, Sequel is great. It's much more of a general purpose database library than AR is, which makes it perfect for non-greenfield work.
Yes. I've found it very intimidating as a grad student. I wonder though if it's really worse in math, or if most academic disciplines don't have the same problem.
There are 12 inches in a foot, and 2.54 cm in an inch. What's the problem?
what ive found is a 0 sugar, 0 bread, very low-carb diet makes a huge difference in my ability to focus. as your no longer riding the daily ups and downs of the blood sugar roller coaster.

.. certainly not easy to kick sugar/bread/milk habit.
I'll give some credit to the stoners for that. But they wouldn't have gotten anywhere if pot didn't actually have significant legitimate medical benefits. And those benefits have mobilized many people suffering from debilitating diseases (and their friends/families), who would otherwise probably never have dreamed of getting involved in a legalization/decriminalization struggle.
what a great idea... is it just for java ???
It doesn't seem like much will be left. Glue code, and maybe session stuff?
sex being more freely available is negative for females hoping to trade their sexuality for financial security. when supply increases and demand stays the same price must decrease. in chaste victorian times a woman could expect to "buy" herself a decent husband with her virginity. (I realize its more complex than this)
The content was alarmist, but the title was worse. I think you overestimate how aware people are of what's in the food they eat though.
I like this response. Having watched my grandparents' and parents' generations age, and being the age I am, it's easier for me to discern what constitutes an individual failure and what is simply a mistake of ignorance. If only the problem of poverty were as simple as sloth, ignorance, lack of opportunity, insufficient education, poor habilitation or mental depression. Any one of those problems is easy to solve. Any two of them in tandem may also be easy to solve. But if you've got all of them AND add happenstance to that list; things that, even at your most cynical, you could not plan against, the complexity of the problem of poverty requires more consideration that any single one of us has.

To some people, all the little things that foster individual success are just background noise -- you aren't aware of the noise until it's not there anymore. This has never been more apparent to me than now, as I am raising my children. Somehow I would like them to be grateful that they have so much more than I did, but the only way that can really feel that is to suffer like I did... and I can't let that happen.

Volunteering is part of the solution, though. We are each other's most precious resource.
Related to that (and I can't believe Marie Claire is the best citation I can quickly finding), the head of a British "relationship charity" claims: "In a new analysis using census data, I found that 60% of families remain intact until their children are 15. Of these, 97% are married."

Source: http://www.marieclaire.co.uk/news/439351/marriage-holds-the-...
he invented a new kind of fuel cell but no papers have been published. i call BS. the fact that its marketed as "green" typically means it costs much more than current solutions but "people should be happy to pay because its good for the environment."
Wow! I can't wait to try this out. I've been having some problems getting Haskell to match C's performance in code heavy on buffer mutation, but halving the Haskell execution time would put it on roughly equal footing.

This provides a lot of encouragement to start some of my rainy-day projects -- my goal is to have a Haskell library with a proof of correctness that can outperform equivalent C. That day draws ever closer.
Yes, there are many counterexamples, but most compounds that are safe in large acute doses are safe in small long-term doses. Given this evidence, the studies showing neuroprotective effects, and the fact that modafinil has been around since the 80's, I assign high probability to its long-term safety.
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Which history? There are many examples of multi-hundred years of stable government by kings. And there are plenty of failed democracies.

Remember that democracy is still a fairly young experiment, which has only recently encountered its mortal enemies - the middle classes and the permanent bureaucracy. I do not claim to know the future but I can tell you which direction things look like they're going to me, and it's not up.

In many ways it's looking like we have created the worst of both worlds - a royal court of privileged elite governing only for themselves, with a neutered king serving only to take the blame. That must end in tears, too.
pyrepl allows multi-line editing of history. It's pretty neat, IMHO.
Status and money can still be very important for a man, in terms of getting sex. It's just that these days, you're not necessarily buying marriage.
Comparing a Rails library to a bridge isn't quite right. Most things lone hackers write are bike sheds and family homes. No one builds a bridge alone.

You want a legacy? Move up the food chain and start discovering new data structures and algorithms. Or work on a large project like GMail.
Devil Mountain CTO Craig Barth is InfoWorld columnist Randall C. Kennedy
Open Angel Forum: Giving the Middle Finger to Pay-to-Pitch
Now all I need to do is reconcile all this with all the other contradictory stuff about what women find appealing and I'll be rolling.
It's much worse in math because mathematicians are an argumentative bunch to begin with and many novice mathematicians have their entire being built around their intellectual abilities so they get quite defensive when their views are challenged.
I can't help feel there is a little tension between:

1) Women founders are disproportionately in their 40s, with families and careers and mortgages. We can't be expected to drop everything and fly across the country to attend a startup incubator program. Instead, we need to receive large amounts of money on the strength of a napkin or Powerpoint deck.

2) Those darn twenty something male techies keep wanting to get paid salaries. Don't they know they're supposed to work for free in promise for 2% of the profits after we get rich?

Tell you what, ladies: I didn't crawl out of the womb knowing how to build web applications. I studied it in school and then made stuff. How's about y'all bang away on that for the next twenty years or so, and then I'll give you the napkin to implement. You can have 2% of the profits after you make me rich.

Sounds like a great deal, right?
That's certainly not true everywhere. Because it's that way in your experience in Canada, doesn't make it true anywhere else.

My experience with the poor and homeless happened with actual ghetto dwellers in Baltimore, MD, not the sweet and fuzzy California or Canadian homeless. I got stuck, through my school, volunteering at a soup kitchen every weekend for about eight weeks. In that time, I witnessed the exact same people showing up every single day. They referred to their welfare checks as their paychecks, openly purchased drugs, wore new Fubu clothes and new Nike shoes, and talked about the latest HBO shows. This was somewhat ironic as, at the time, I couldn't afford cable TV or HBO, new brand name clothes, or very much of anything else, but I was able to pay for my own food. I just couldn't go somewhere and have a person serve it to me though, as they were able to. I could also afford to give up my weekend and drive to Baltimore to serve people that can afford fifty bucks for an eight ball, but cannot spare fifteen dollars for twenty pounds of rice. In the entire eight weeks, I only met a single person that was actually down on their luck, everyone else was just lazy.

The reason poor people have no money is that they are awful at fiscal management. Instead of food, they pay for cable, instead of rent, they buy drugs, expensive clothes, and shoes. That's not my problem, and continuing to take care of people that refuse to care for themselves does nothing but perpetuate the problem. These people won't work because they have no incentive to do so. They receive more from the government than they could make with the amount of effort they're willing to expend.

If you want to solve homelessness and hunger, solve the problem of rich liberals feeling guilty and deciding to solve other peoples problems because they have too much time on their hands.
which makes sense, because marriage was something of a guarantee in times when divorce was extremely stigmatized. it isn't really anything of the sort now, though I suppose there is alimony and child support.
Looks like GPL zealots are doing their job for them now.

I'd like to see some justification for this statement.

In my experience, the people who try to extend the GPL beyond its lawful or reasonable capabilities are more interested in forbidding competition than guaranteeing user freedom. For example, MySQL's bizarre claims that their protocol is GPL'd and that non-GPL reimplementations are infringement, or Matt Mullenweg asserting that the GPL is a construct of the address space.

If RMS or Eben Moglen make a claim regarding the GPL, then it's worth analyzing and debating -- but Joe Nobody, author of Yet Another PHP Blog Engine, cannot be considered a reliable authority on GPL or copyright law.
There is specific wording in the GPL covering that case.

Which part of the GPL do you have in mind?

Each theme is its own piece of blogging software that uses Wordpress to abstract away common problems. That's a library.

That's a library under a tremendously contorted definition of library. As I said, if that's the criterion for something being a library, any program that loads and runs extensions is a library. Firefox is a library, Apache is a library, etc. It may be your preferred definition but it's at odds with both common sense and the way the Wordpress people describe their product.

http://wordpress.org/about/
watch me.
According to the article, Mr. Eisen gets a $1,595 monthly disability check each month because he has diabetes, hypertension and liver failure. Surely you realize that medical care for these kinds of conditions costs something, especially in the US. Calling him and his 57 year-old wife "incompetent" and implying that an elderly couple with medical issues could live off of a single minimum wage salary is heartless.

It's important to make sure that welfare policy doesn't become a disincentive to work, but we're talking about a disability check that doesn't even bring them up to the poverty line.
Definitely. XSLT is something that could work this way -- the blogging software generates an XML document with all the relevant information, and then the XML stylesheet is applied to make the XHTML (or Atom, etc.) result. Additional CSS and Javascript could of course be bundled.

In this case, there would be no question as to the legal status of the theme. It's just a program that transforms the output of another.
Sorry, I couldn't find a timestamp. It seemed relevant.
I don't really like this article, in that I know of plenty of successful startups started by women or that had a lot of women involved during the early days.

In short, I reject the idea there is any kind of glass ceiling or whatnot, especially when "the idea" plus 3 knowledgeable people working out of a garage, is all you need.
Yes, that's certainly fine anecdotal evidence, and I'm well aware of the "drunken Russian" stereotype, but I'm looking for hard numbers.

For example, alcohol consumption per capita (among those 15 years and older) in Russia is less than Spain, the UK, France, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Portugal, Ireland, Nigeria, etc:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_alcohol_co...
"virtually identical" != "identical"
If RMS or Eben Moglen make a claim regarding the GPL, then it's worth analyzing and debating -- but Joe Nobody, author of Yet Another PHP Blog Engine, cannot be considered a reliable authority on GPL or copyright law.

I was with you until you wrote this. Why can't programmers understand licenses? What's wrong with writing blogging software?
I think that the job of a doctor is defined to be treating people who are ill. If you want to change the definition that's fine, but you need to make an argument for that.
or an Emacs prereq, for us Vim users...
I should preface this that I don't really know much about copyright law. The sticky point to me is that you could write WP themes as binaries called using fork/exec. So in essence, the developer's choice to use WP function calls and variables effectively makes it a derivate work, at least in my opinion.

I'm not a big fan of this, though it makes the most sense in my mind (at least with my opinion mostly biased by the GPL). I remember reading Dries, the found of Drupal, effectively claiming that all Drupal modules were GPL'ed and not liking it so much that I have altered my plans for future Drupal modules (all the better for me, my intellectual property will not be open for all to witness as I intend a more hosted solution which I can charge a higher premium for).

Ultimately, I feel like crusades by open source projects (WordPress, Drupal, etc) to GPL their modules will backfire and create a more restrictive, hosted component to them that they will ultimately regret. Dries did this for this anti-spam module, Mollom. I don't think he'd be so happy if core features like Views or CCK performed identically. Drupal would effectively suck. I guess thats all the more reason to reject the idea that plugins are derivative works.
"... He has outlasted the relevance of all of them. His first articles would have been frontpaged on whatever came before Slashdot. ..."

Not quite true. Slashdot is from about '96 and JOS is from about 1999-2000. Could the real reason be a bit simpler as suggested Joel is running out of new ideas? Is it possible the upcoming IPO might also play part?

"... I can’t, which is one of the reasons why I rarely write about programming: it’s just not worth the risk of putting myself out there on that subject because the risk of strongly negative feedback is higher than with most other content that I can produce. It’s much easier to share my breakfast than my easily argued, easily disproven, intellectually vulnerable thoughts on programming. ..."

And all loose out. Has this kind of negative feedback held people back from conversing in past times?
A more efficient natural gas generator is fine, but not exactly "green" compared to wind, solar, thermal, hydro, nuclear or other carbon neutral tech. Does this device include carbon capture, or does it just spew CO2?
The future of employment?
[...] Today non-technical entrepreneurs are just as likely to come up with viable startup concepts as programmers are. Neither the startup system, nor the traditional support system for small, brick-and-mortar businesses reflect this societal change yet, so there is a void that needs to be filled or we'll miss out on opportunities for innovation from unlikely sources.

Non-engineering women, I'd like to meet every non-engineering MBA trying to break into startups. You guys should talk. I think you'll find you have a lot in common.
It's almost as if paying someone to commit a crime on your behalf is a crime itself! (Apple can't kick reporters in the shins, but apparently they are just fine paying Foxconn to do it.)
The issue is direction. Themes call into Wordpress to get data. Mozilla plugins are called by Mozilla; if anything, Mozilla becomes GPL'd when it loads a GPL'd plugin. (Remember the whole "kernel taint" issue?)

Anyway, if you want me to dissect a Wordpress theme and show you why I think this, I will. But I think it's obvious if you look for yourself.
There is more than one right way to start a business. The establishment doesn't need to change, nothing precludes women from figuring out their own way.
Yes, it would have helped Republicans quite a bit in the last decade. It should be hard for government to institute sweeping changes that only 51% of the voters want.
Programmer critics can be very difficult, often just as difficult and insulting as the unintelligent critics. However, I find the ignorant people are usually worse and more frequent and are there just to troll or make shocking remarks without even trying to backup with logic. I have seen programmer critics get really bad, nitpicking everything. It's like they have no lives or respect at the worst, trashing everyone like they are smartest in the cosmos.
I think you're misunderstanding.

There is no reason a programmer cannot understand copyright, and there is nothing wrong with writing unoriginal software. But if somebody's going to make extraordinary, unsupported claims about the law, they need to have some experience or authority to back it up. To my knowledge, Mullenweg has neither.

If Eben Moglen said tomorrow that the GPL applies to any software in the same address space, then it would be dramatic and worrisome because he is a copyright lawyer and is one of the world's leading experts on the GPL. If the cashier at McDonalds said the same thing, I don't think it would deserve the same amount of consideration or concern.
I do that with http://github.com/darius/halp in Emacs.
"Supercar" seems a little generous seeing as how it has a top speed of 30mph.
The Bloom energy cell supposedly works without combustion. So no CO/CO2 etc. But there have to be some byproducts somewhere.
Ah, well that helped me track the 50% blurb down to this article in Lancet:

http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-67...

Which was a study of one town in Russia. Their interpretation of the results includes this line:

"Almost half of all deaths in working age men in a typical Russian city may be accounted for by hazardous drinking."

From my brief research, it looks like most articles online replaced "typical Russian city" with "Russia", which seems unfounded given the research.
This Randall Kennedy dude is an epic troll. I love his responses to the article. He spent years as a writer basically pimping this terrible xpnet stuff. If he's not lying about getting companies to throw down real cash on his shitty software then he won and he's laughing all the way to the bank.
MySpace’s Hail Mary Strategy: “Discovery”
From 0.4.0 onward, the main functionality of Compojure will be to provide a routing concise DSL:

(GET "/books/:isbn" [isbn]
(show-book isbn))

This actually produces a fairly complex handler function, so there's still a fair bit of Compojure-specific code left. But it's true that Compojure will be a significantly more lightweight framework than it currently is.
Was there. One of the best PyCons so far.
This article is incoherent and you appear to be both dignifying it and contradicting yourself. How un-McKenzian of you!

First, barely a cobweb strand of logic connects the point of this article to gender. "If I had a nickle for every time I've heard that you can't get a startup founded without an engineer". What does this have to do women? Either of my younger brothers (both of whom work in the arts) could make the same complaint.

Second, the idea that funding and attention is inappropriately piled on a narrow slice of young males is a point I think I've seen you make about 100 times on Hacker News.

(If I wanted to further engage with this article --- and I don't, really --- I'd also point out that the "accelerators" and "incubators" and whatnots that this author feels women are excluded from aren't really blessings. A point I feel like you'd at least sympathize with, since you built your company up on 5 hours a week of downtime off being a salaryman).
In the egalitarian listserv world that I frequent, programmers generally are extremely helpful, more patient than necessary, and write remarkably good prose. Perhaps because jerks like to comment on blogs because doing so doesn't have ramifications in a repuation based ecosystem in which there is less asymmetry. It is easy and safe to bad mouth the gods, not so in the assembly...
A little bit of selection bias there: you don't read about all the valid transactions that go through, and all the fraudulent transations that get frozen.
Sure, but p(getting murdered|having recently bought ice cream) > p(getting murdered|having recently bought a christmas tree), also ;)
There's definitely a pervasive strain of sexism running through our industry. I laughed at it right up until my wife tried to re-enter the workforce a few years after we got married.
This strongly resembles Pylons' approach: Break core components into separate projects, so that each can evolve more quickly and so that one can use the best component for each area.