skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Key Lessons on Enterprise Sales and Leadership by Mark Leslie
I've had the fortune to learn about enterprise sales from Mark Leslie (http://bit.ly/MLeslie), a well-known leader in the technology industry. In our last day of class, he shared some key lessons, including some practical tips, I thought were great and I would love to share here: http://serrastreet.blogspot.com/2010/03/key-lessons-learned-from-prof-mark.html
I put that on the list just to piss pedants off.

If you're not careful, I'll put HTML on there to see you really squirm:-)

Kidding aside, it's there because I think it's interesting to see where it stacks up against other things.

(By the way, the list I am referring to, is of course the original site at http://LangPop.com - I had nothing else to do with this quiz)
I did something similar with the Philips frame, bought one for my parents and my in-laws and they both have their own dedicated galleries in a self-hosted Gallery2 installation, which allows me and the rest of my family to upload through the web, via email or directly from windows with the 'publish to the web' feature. Works great. Only complaint that I have with this frame is that it reloads every image every time it's shown, rather than caching it. Don't know why, it does cause high bandwidth usage :/
Will Apple ever permit a full-blown non-Safari browser app in the store?

If it's just a WebKit wrapper, probably. If it's a different rendering engine, not a chance.

And will Apple ever permit an interactive programming tool like Smalltalk adapted for the touch screen, or (one of my ideas) a graphical meta-calculator building tool that ultimately allows the user to do "real" programming?

Smalltalk, no. Graphing calculators with variable assignments and stuff, sure as long as you can't create things that resemble real applications.

Ultimately, I think the answers are yes and yes, but the unsureness of those answers is troubling.

I'd be looking at developing for Android tablets, where you don't have to give the manufacturer a kill switch to your ideas. Or HTML5 if possible.
Except Android is older than WebOS.
For me, it doesn't have anything to do with karma. Maximum when people disagree with me I get a little peeved that I spent time on what I thought was a thoughtful comment only to be down voted but it happens.

I think the problem arises when thoughtful comments, maybe from people playing devil's advocate, are buried at the bottom on the thread or even worse highlighted in light gray. To be honest it probably is the exceptional case, but it's disappointing the times it does happen that those comments miss their opportunity to generate interesting discussion especially when the rest of the thread is, no offense intended, the usual hacker news echo chamber.
This book is filled with great anecdotes and effective strategies. I've used a lot of them, however there are some downsides.

1) By constantly making people feel good about themselves, you create a sense of entitlement and pride which can be very difficult to work with when you need them to stand down. There is a reason they tear you down before they build you up in boot camp.

2) People who religiously practice this style of communication can seem annoying and manipulative, even if they are successful and popular. When I've followed the advice in this book completely, I've ended up feeling more popular but also more alone.

I've found a sprinkled dose reality check can be a good thing for all involved, particularly those you care most about.
That's a good question! I think that even in that case, the best answer would be to break things out so that people could see the different categories. The amount of code in production (this is something where langpop.com likely falls short: I can't think of any way of getting data on all the COBOL out there without paying through the nose for it) certainly counts for something in terms of popularity, but so does the language most people know some of. So does what's hot these days and being used for new systems being written.

I think, though, that ultimately it doesn't really matter once you get past a certain threshold and see that people are writing libraries for the language.
The Free Exchange of Ideas
Isn't this the same reason why optical illusions work? The brain finds patterns and holds on to them.
The typical argument is that China cannot resist the money. But, to be a devil's advocate here, perhaps they think that it's MORE risky to their business to stay in China. That is, someone was trying to steal their technology. If someone got their hands on their secret sauce algorithms that would surely put the business, as a whole, at risk considering it's their one real moneymaker.
Dr. Seuss and the 236 Words that Changed Reading Forever
I can't work out why it's downvoted

Probably because you wrote "Next they'll be telling us they don't proofread their title submissions, un-freaking-believable ;0)" as the opening sentence. The rest of the comment looks fine, but it leads off with language that sounds like LOL-speak. Too bad you got downvoted. But the downvotes give you something to learn from about how to express yourself when you are making a serious comment, as that comment mostly was.
More than that - be prepared to share data with "the opposition" and to question sources that provide "supporting evidence".

I was raised as an academic (have a science PhD) and, without following this issue in detail, have continued to assume that climate change is "real". However, reading that column made me deeply ashamed about the way people - scientists - have behaved.

On the other hand, I can understand how being attacked by financially powerful interests that have a vested interest in discrediting valid, difficult, scientific work, generates that a "siege mentality".

So perhaps one thing that needs to come from this is institutional support (moral guidance and counseling, for example) for people doing research that is going to be opposed by powerful people in the "real world"...
24/25. Missed ColdFusion.

Why the heck do they put SQL as a language but not HTML, CSS, or Makefiles? I kept trying variants of those, because once I got SQL anything goes...
D was easy though - I went to type "Delphi" and "D" popped up. Cool, got one for free.
Lessons from the tech bust
T-SQL and Postgres SQL are turing complete. I think at that point you can call it a programming language.
Yup, totally agree. Just a marketing thing I guess, the "App Bus" wouldn't have sounded quite as good, and I just wanted to go along with the naming. There's a real business model in this, though.
Turing completeness should be the minimal standard to be considered a programming language. SQL is a pseudo-relational query & update language. HTML is a markup language. Both are useful. Neither are programming languages.

There are SQL extensions to make it Turing complete, because Turing completeness is pretty darn useful.
Attached to that, though, is that there are different levels of "jerkness." Most of us could do with being more jerk-like when it comes to defending or promoting our own interests and ideas, but we need far fewer jerks who try to mess up other people's lives. Sadly, they all seem to get lumped in under the same term..
Delusions of Google's Arrogant Leaders
I challenge the assumption in this subthread that downvoting is a "socially damaging act." In many cases, downvoting is simply cleaning out the trash and improving the community. There are quite a few downvotes that should, if anything, GAIN karma for the users who make them.
You persist in focusing on patents as a reward. That is not their intended function, it is to stimulate innovation. Society has no interest in making you rich, unless it is a (necessary) side effect of stimulating innovation. The stimulating effect of financial incentives for the patent holder must always be weighed against the stifling effect of the subsequent monopoly. Unless the former outweighs the latter, patents in their current form should be abolished.

For it to work, the bar for "nonobviousness" must be set infinitely higher than it is now. I'm not entirely opposed to software patents. For the RSA algorithm, for example, I could see the validity of claiming it's a patentable invention. But there are a few key requirements:

a) Patents can only cover process, not end results. If you patent a way to make steel, I'm free to develop another way if I don't want to or am able to license your method. In the same way, if you patent a way to "process gestures on a multi-touch device", I should be free to implement another, independent way of accomplishing the same result. You must not be able to patent the idea of accepting input through gestures. Doing so will severely stifle innovation, because there is no longer any incentive for anyone to put in the work to improve the idea; the first, half-assed patented idea then becomes the way or the highway...

b) For the system to work in practice, there must be a way that one can reasonably find out whether something is patented. That means the bar must be very high, so that the number is lower, and the overly abstract, overbroad patent descriptions currently must be replaced with something much more precise. I think the bar should be high enough that the numbers of patents approved number in the hundreds, max, per year. For it to be patented, it should be freaking genius. Your jaw should drop from pure awe when you read the description.

If the above requirements are not met, the best way to proceed is to abolish the whole idea.

As an aside, I'm amused how many people who normally are adamant about the supreme efficiency of free markets then completely turn around and use arguments like yours above about "why should they develop this when someone will just steal the idea". What is the fundamental difference between patents and preventing someone from opening a coffee shop in a good location because you opened one there first? Why don't you think free competition will produce the most efficient outcome when it comes to patents?
what are you guys building? would be cool to check it out.
The subtleties in outsourcing using RentACoder
Antimatter Supernova -The Biggest Bomb in the Cosmos
The worst enemy of freedom in software is not Apple, it's Nintendo. You're pretty free to develop and distribute software as you want on OS X. On new Nintendo devices, they control the way software is distributed, they tax you, they make you obey their rules. Imagine a world where all applications must be licensed and vetted by Nintendo, for all their devices. This would be hell. This is where Nintendo is going. Stop using Nintendo. Use Ball on a String, or if you can't, use Apple.
I spoke the other day with a lawyer buddy of mine who is a leading patent lawyer in Silicon Valley, and here is what he had to say about Bilski:

1. The USPTO has in fact tightened up significantly on the granting of software patents for the past five years, meaning that the flaky ones (like One-Click) are historical artifacts and not indicative of current practice.

2. There is nothing in the law that can reasonably be interpreted to impose a ban on software patents and this will not happen in Bilski.

3. Abuses in the field are rampant, with patents mills acting much like extortionists running a protection racket.

4. In the long run, the problems will be largely self-correcting, as the same blizzard of software patents that now clogs the system will eventually become prior art that will serve as the best defense against trivial patents of the future that would otherwise hinder innovation.

Take the points for what they are worth. Personally, I think Bilski's claims will go down, as will the absurdly expansionist interpretations proferred by his lawyer, but this will not put an end to software patents. It is Congress which is constitutionally charged with defining patentable subject matter and it will take nothing less than an act of Congress to impose definitive reform in this area.
I like this fund too, but to clarify, it moves double inverse to to US T-Bond Yields. For instance, if the ETF portfolio has an average duration of 15, a one percent increase in treasury bonds rates will cause a 30% increase in the ETF price. A nice hedge against higher rates.
I've ended up feeling more popular but also more alone.

Anecdotally, it seems to me that, on average, the most successful members of our society are lonelier than the average - celebrities go on about it a lot.

Luckily, people are motivated by different things. Many people are glad to be financially poor but well loved in their communities. Others prefer the alternative. None of this is good or bad unless it feels so to you. Was becoming more popular but distanced good to you? If not, I can certainly see why you might want to tone down the charm :-)
Consensus emerges for key Web app standard
Obama Nasa plans 'catastrophic' say Moon astronauts
That's true, but summaries like these are very useful in two cases:

1) People who've already read the book (like me). Keeping big books around is a waste of space, but a list like this can bring the content of the book flooding back.

2) People who aren't going to buy the book or think it sounds lame, but who could be convinced by getting a taste of what it offers.

I'd certainly advise reading the book, but I think there's still a ton of value in summaries like this.
Absolutely correct, but I don't really give a shit :-) I'm curious to see how it fares against other languages. I'd rather have more data than less. You can always use a magic marker to cover it up on your computer screen if it offends you.

There's a reason behind things like that too. It's a good check on the results to see how well SQL does in, say, job listings, where one listing might be a hit for both Java and SQL, as opposed to Ohloh, where, yes, SQL is going to be present in many projects, but not a majority of the code. And that makes sense, because pretty much anyone out there is going to know and use some SQL, so as a job skill, it's extremely popular.
21/25 with SQL, Assembly, Actionscript, and Delphi missing. What happened to Smalltalk?
Once downvoted to below 1, insightful comments tend to get ignored and this a real loss beyond bruised egos

Do you have some current examples with links at hand? I have noticed that one can upvote comments, however old, so any of us who like to emphasize the positive can upvote good comments whenever we find them.

By the way, I asked in my reply to the thread-opening post what kinds of upvotes are most helpful to the community. I'd love to hear replies to that question in that subthread, if you please.
Pacquiao vs Clottey Live Streaming | Watch Live Online Boxing
what if it prompted you with options like Digg does (minus an "other" option) as to why you are down voting

pg opened a thread a while ago asking options for flagging posts.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1006589
Have there been many cases outside the US? This whole thing seems very US-centric, considering these cars are sold all over the world.
Apple: Now the third largest US company by market capitalization
What is the value of the "mistakes" made by cabbies undercharging Westchester travelers with the Manhattan rate?
Apple Sold 120,000 iPads Yesterday; Made $75m in 19 hours
> Steam would not refund his purchase so he threatened to file a credit card chargeback and they replied that their policy in the event of a chargeback is to disable all of the users games immediately.

How is that not extortion? Valve can obviously disable individual games, so it's not like people could use chargebacks to get free games. It seems like you should at least be allowed some time to make sure the game actually works on your system.
What do you mean by "drive-by downvotes"? Some comments are more apt to elicit written responses than others. Sometimes a downvote is a user's efficient use of time to improve the quality of the forum, saving time for posting written responses in other subthreads.
My favorite quote in there:

"Apple has been able to generate over $75 million in revenue in one day on a product that 99.9% of purchasers haven't touched or for that matter, even seen in person," said Victor Castroll, an analyst with Valcent Financial Group.
This is exactly my point. The free content becomes a personal marketing vehicle - usually an extremely valuable one. You don't have to charge directly for the content to unlock this value.
OTA gets 13 MB/s, and I'm pretty sure that's what Cable uses. That's not really enough for 1080i. I know that DirecTV moved to MPEG4. Not sure if it helped at all. And FiOS using more bandwidth than OTA, I believe.
That is not what I am saying.

What I am saying is that if you create free, popular, useful content you can't help but make money from the word of mouth it generates.
Quaero - European government sponsored search engine project
My blog http://blog.gridspy.co.nz/ is never going to turn a profit. Hopefully it does attract more eyes to my other ventures, such as http://gridspy.co.nz/
I haven't really noticed this trend. But keep in mind, I'm just one data point. To give a rough estimate, I'd say that for every 20 or so down-voted comments I come across, there is one whose lack of points is actually confusing to me.

I find that most of the down-voted comments tend to contain at least one (or a combination of) a number of things, including being off topic, using immature language, presenting opinions as facts without anything to back them up, being hostile, etc.

It is because of these observations that I haven't gotten the impression that there is a trend towards down-voting solely due to disagreement. I believe it does happen, but not as much as some say.
Well, NZMSV, I think we all could agree that we don't like being manipulated. But as someone who is more self-aware and perceptive than most, NZMSV, wouldn't you agree that the name trick is just a component of what people really want: recognition. The point is to very quickly pick up on the story they tell about themselves, and play it back to them.
I've seen that argument before, and I have to tell you, it's a bit of overdramatization from someone I respect a lot, who should know better. Apple has to sell unlocked Macs, because that's how you develop software for their closed platforms. Nobody mentions this much, but if you want to develop an iPhone app, you need a Mac, and you need the iPhone SDK, compilers, etc. The average person does not need an unlocked Mac. Developers like us do, and Apple will have to provide that. Choice is great for consumers, and not everyone needs a computer to write code on. We developers do, and we're really the only ones constantly beating this dead horse. Consumers don't want to hack their own devices, they just expect it to work.

Apple isn't the only one doing this. I don't know much C# and I don't run Windows anymore, but I want to write XBOX games. Should I be mad at MS for making me buy Windows, learn Visual Studio + C#, and pay a membership fee to write games for my XBOX? They have a developer program too, and a completely closed system. They take a cut of sales. They don't review your apps though, but honestly I like the fact that through the Appstore on my iPod, stuff isn't gonna trash my iPod like it did when I used to have it jailbroken.
I'm always kind of suspect of these 'programming language popularity' measurements because they usually rely on search engine result volume. I think a more meaningful metric would be, say, job openings by programming language.
That's approximately 1.5 ipads per second, let's hope they live up to expectations.

It's on par with the iphone, which sold 128,000 units on the first day.

It will be interesting to see if the curve remains consistent with iphone sales over time.
Ironically, I feel that Getting Things Done (of all things :) needs this treatment more than many other books. I think GTD ideas would be much better digestible in form of concise 30-50 page article as opposed to the tedious and inflated read the actual book is.
Those old timers don't realize that space is about more than nationalistic grandstanding and sticking flags into moonscapes. If you want to see real activity in space that means that getting stuff out of the Earth's atmosphere has to be significantly cheaper, and the only way that's going to happen is if space becomes a bigger industry than it is today - which means commercialization.
Yep, I had downvote access for a while and then it passed me by... story of my life.
Chumby, http://www.chumby.com/, is a device that's made to be easily hackable. However, the screen size is small.
Yes, but I think the interesting part of this (and similar) demonstrations is that it shows illusions that cross more than one sense. It's not just tricking your eyes; it's using your eyes to trick your hearing.

See also 'the McGurk Effect':

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFPtc8BVdJk

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jtsfidRq2tw

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

It would be neat to find reverse examples -- where sound changes visual perception. (Perhaps the typical dramatic false-punch is one; the added sound of contact makes an otherwise implausibly short or off-center strike seem much more realistic.)
I wish The Gulag Archipelago were search-able online somewhere. There is a chapter where Solzhenitsyn is describing the attitude of the various ethnic groups who occupy the same hell-hole prison that he is in. A prison where many were confronted with the choice between licking others plates and starving to death.

I can't remember if it was Croatians or whom, but he described a particular group as being the nicest, most generous bunch of men, despite the fact they were dying of hunger. He mentions that this one person would always address him by his full name (including the patronymic) with the intent to show respect and endearment.

I think this usage of a person's name embodies what Carnegie was trying to get across.

[edit]

If you have children, try addressing them by their full name. It's the closest thing to their actual personage that came come from your mouth, and it's a pleasure to take the extra time to utter it because you love them so much.

I think the key is not to try to figure out where to sprinkle someone's name into a sentence, but to figure out how to like them enough to want to use their name.

[/edit]
Like it or not, downvoting is often perceived as an act of social violence by the downvotee. And it is intended and widely understood to be a punishment, the opposite of approval.

Social sanctions like that may be necessary, but they also degrade the quality of life overall. Downvoting should have a cost, especially when it's an anonymous act.
"An exit from the world’s biggest Internet market would cost Google, whose sales growth slowed during the U.S. recession, $600 million in revenue, according to estimates by JPMorgan Chase & Co."

On the other hand, I wonder how much it's costing them. Once you add in all the costs of filtering the Chinese searches, I could see them not making as much profit as you'd expect. But this is sheer conjecture on my part. It's also possible that Google's bluffing.
Because most employees are lazy when it comes to power conservation.

They will install a GridSpy solution and discover that everyone is leaving computers and lights on all night. Then they send an email around saying "please turn off your computers and lights tonight."

The next morning, they look at their dashboard and calculate that they saved $40 last night, or $1,200 if they can keep it up all month. A week later, GridSpy shows that people are getting slack and leaving computers on at night again. Now management has real data to back them up when they point out how keeping up this behaviour is important.

Left to itself, power usage will most likely revert to the mean as people move back to their old habits, new employees enter, new equipment is added and so on. A continued installation should help to prevent this.
Those 128,000 people got to play with an iPhone before making the purchase though.

For me and everyone who's pre-ordering, we're simply buying blind and trusting Steve. That's pretty amazing in my opinion.
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