skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"A good article on what happens when you let criminals control the soft drug market -- murders for no reason. If weed was legal, you can bet that nobody would be killing each other over territory; it would just be yet another thing you could buy at Starbucks or the corner convenience store."

If weed was legalized, the dealers would just move onto something heavier, like cocaine. Not only that, but the weed you get from the government would have to be regulated and it wouldn't be the same as the stuff you get on the streets, which would still result in dealers selling it illegally.

When you can't get it at starbucks (which probably won't happen unless they get a license) or as easily as you want it, will you still buy from a dealer down the street?

The problem I see is that many of the pro-marijuana users are just like the pro-piracy people. They won't stop until they get exactly what they want, which is just unrealistic.

When music piracy first came to the masses in '99 (I know it was around well before this), the main argument was that music was too expensive and the artists were getting screwed. Now that you can get music for 99 cents and the artist can sell it without a recording contract, piracy is worse than ever and there are a whole new set of excuses.

This is why I believe that the illegal sale of pot will never stop unless it's completely unregulated, which will never happen.

We also don't have any really good long-term studies regarding pot. Cigarettes cause cancer. Do we really want to legalize another substance that does the same thing or worse?

You also seem to shift the blame of the violence on the government. So, it's the government's fault that kids decided to sell pot illegally, make shit-tons of money, and attempt to get another dealer killed (and get killed in the process). They could have somehow magically prevented the situation by legalizing pot.

It's this kind of thinking that has blamed the cigarette companies for killing people when in reality, we all have free will. If you start smoking tomorrow, it's your own fault if you get cancer, not the company that sold it to you.
Maybe it's snobbish, but I think if you need that kind of low content tutorial, you are not yet a Hacker, and should perhaps look for "beginner news" instead (and I don't even call myself a hacker). Let's raise the bar ever so slightly beyond "Hello World"?
Indeed. Things have radically changed in the embedded market since this time.

For starters, even WindRiver is selling embedded Linux. Customers got tired of the "How much do you make? Yeah, we'll take 10% of that" business model.
Hunch's cdixon posted links to all his startup posts on one page
You could not be more wrong on basically every point you've made, but it would be a waste of my time to bother refuting them.
Interesting, so that amends my statement to:

Baseline profile JPEG was specifically created to be a royalty-free standard. JPEG-arithmetic is the more advanced optional extension to the format with patent royalties that no-one uses on the web for that very reason.

(Though to be fair to IBM, though the situation appears vaguer than I'd like, it seems they were happy to licence their patents royalty-free, but other companies that also held patents weren't: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arithmetic_coding#US_patents_on...)
I loved the quote from David when he said selling to Fortune 500 companies takes "strippers and steaks."

Overall, great interview.

I'd love to see Jason C take on Jason Fried and DHH.
I'm just putting the finishing touches on a site for SME's. When is the Startup Weekend?
No point in adding me to your list if it's not going to be out of beta yet (I assume).
For the challenge, mostly. Also because it can result in a good call back as well (apparently after I left my call-backs had good conversion rates).

As long as you combine the right amount of humility, amiability and possibly humour you can turn almost anyone around. For example if someone is getting A LOT of sales calls and yours is the straw that broke the camel's back then you can still help them. Provide information, give em the telephone preference service number (to remove them from sales calls databases), tell them how automated diallers work or how the regulations work in regards to cold calls. Be honest.

There is no reason why any call should have to end in a negative on either side. :)
Yes, you can email to post, and you can also post from the web, and post links to other sites/posts via a bookmarklet javascript thingie.
I'm annoyed that my comments on the TC story were apparently removed.
It's this weekend, but send me an email: j@jasonlbaptiste.com with the app.
It works for some things. But charging users money to use facebook/twitter/most websites just wouldn't work.
no because it is not, and that's our problem in this situation.

I really hope google is gonna open on2 VP8 :
http://www.on2.com/index.php?599

It looks even better than h.264, and it could definately solve this mess
Studies will one day find the overall tonality resonates with stoners brainwaves on a 1:1 ratio.
If users didn't find advertising useful, they wouldn't click on them. So the two forces aren't opposing.
Here's another career possibility, given that you can program, but don't want to do that.

(Note: DO NOT BECOME A SOFTWARE TESTER: No respect, no upwards career path to speak of, deadly boring. Only do this if starvation is the alternative.)

Anyway, there's the specialty of software building. Someone needs to set things up so that developers can "push one button" and get the current system built (see the Joel Test). Many need help with version control/SCM and so on (and that has to be set up). And all these have to be maintained.

This can also extend into system administration, someone has to set up their systems, in some cases they'll have a test machine with the latest version of foundational software that they're trying to work with or on top of, and someone else should maintain that and keep it up to date.

(One of the disasters of Vista was how little time the programmers could spend on actually programming. Besides the usual, according to a Mini-Microsoft commentator, they'd have to spend about one day a week keeping their Vista test machine up to date.)
"Laws against marijuana don't make sense. Millions of people are incarcerated for simple possession. Prohibition simply raises the profit margins for it, pushing dealing to organized crime, and eventually violence."

Millions for simple possession..really?

Unless you are dealing, most cops will not bother you. Many states now also will only slap you with a fine.

Anything illegal will have a black-market behind it. Prostitution, gambling, and even illegal fireworks. The only way to get rid of the organized crime and violence is to legalize everything that is illegal..which isn't very practical.

It's not really prohibition. It's illegal. Alcohol prohibition only lasted for 13 years. Marijuana and many other drugs have been illegal for 70+ years. Otherwise, we would say there is a prohibition on rape and murder.
"You could not be more wrong on basically every point you've made, but it would be a waste of my time to bother refuting them."

haha. Famous words from someone with no way to back up their argument.
I wish you wouldn't have done so. I came across a comment you made recently and something made me interested in hearing more about you. I can't remember what it was.

Sure, telling stories about what you've done for others is great but that shouldn't preclude telling your others accomplishments. I can't understand why someone would take these comments as "me me me" when they were solicited and there's clearly a very interested audience.
I'm Brazilian and here jazz is also far way from the mainstream.
I like jazz that "got the blues"; listen to some Focus jazz and you will see what I mean.

The problem with jazz is that, as commented by other folks, it is an art. Some jazz scales sounds suck, but they are hard to do. You will only like these musics if you appreciate the ability of the musician on playing it, and not the "sound/music" itself.
Exactly ^^ Observing the phenomena would change it's state. It's one of those complete head-fks about quantumn mechanics.

You just have to accept that the quantumn world concerns probabilities (wave functions) rather than finite "locations" which we are used to in the non-quantum world.

It's a hugely interesting subject.
Apple has an uphill battle on this one. from the start they did not support Divx or Xvid, which are the leading torrent formats.

On the other hand, Xbox360 supports those formats and more, has lastFM, Netflix, Games, and streaming from the computer, at a price that is cheaper then Apple sub par offer, the xbox360 outsells the appleTV dramatically.
Reputation rule changes on stack overflow
Oh my, dude, please, who on earth are you to teach complete beginners when you're this incompetent?

be sure to download the minified version, as it reduces the strain on your server.

Oh really?

The second, and prefered way, is to include it from Google’s Content Delivery Network, or CDN for short. There are two main benefits to doing it this way. Firstly, we can make sure we are always using the most recent version of the library

Utterly useless reason.

and secondly it means your server does not have to load the file and it takes up less bandwidth

...and what about that if every website used Google's CDN, then the library'd already be in their cache and so your page loads faster for them?

However, I stopped reading when I read this:

For example, to select all divs on my page, it’s as simple as: $(‘div’).

This makes me think you're not incompetent, instead you're a hilarious evil genius. What on earth are you doing breaking newbies' brains by typing crap with backquotes? Did you write this guide in MS Word or something?
If you're really interested in security and not just looking for 1337 5ki11z, start here:

http://www.google.com

http://www.securityfocus.com/archive/1

http://cve.mitre.org/
They has been used as a neutral generic singular in English for a very long time. I believe there are extant examples in Shakespeare, for example.
The site is a bit confusing to use. The first thing I looked for was how to put in whatever items I wanted.

How does the text box and the something random button work? Quite confused...
Either that or there are more young programmers than there are older programmers.
I heard once that the main verse of Stairway was written by Robert Plant one night when he was high on drugs. When he woke up, the lyrics were scribbled on a napkin.

Never been able to find if it's true or not. It's probably a greatly exaggerated rock legend.
..but colloquially "they" has been used as the 3rd person unisex singular for a long time. Still don't understand how "she" avoids sexism.

The article is missing the stage where you get into management, fall hopelessly behind on current technologies, and forget how to code.
How To Decrypt An Encrypted Wordpress Theme Footer File
I think they should have offered at least one phone with decent hardware. Probably too late for that now.
Tuition-Free University Gains a Following
It seems to me that the author purposely avoided to discuss the reasons against Mozilla not adopting H264:

- Firefox may be the most used browser on computers, but on mobile devices H264 is clearly winning. And that's where companies want to go right now.

- A lot (the majority?) of online videos are already encoded using H264.

- Flash is also proprietary. So, if you shun H264 for your ideals, you should do so also with flash.
Great part about 'fire the workaholics' 'do less' @ 1:20 or so. Jason rips DHH to shreds.
Obviously DHH can't publicly say "sure we'd love to sell 37 signals for a nice profit." I don't see the profundity in latching on to this point. No customers of 37signals want to hear that it's being shopped around.
37signals is not being shopped around because 37signals is not for sale.
> US "hackers" see that they can influence politics.

Err... the ones pushing this through are VC's, who are, pretty much by definition, a fairly well to do group. Closer to hackers than, say, Warren Buffet, probably, but still, not quite the same thing.
What Jason C didn't mention was all the other people who'd been putting in 80 hour weeks that didn't make it. You think Google was the only one working long hours? Google had a better idea. They worked hard on their better idea, but it's the idea that won, not the hour count.

The tech graveyard is full of overworked, tired, run-down, exhausted people who put in more hours than their bodies could handle. I run into people all the time who are putting in ridiculous hours and getting no where.

Hours don't make it. Good choices, the right focus, and intelligent decisions over a long period of time make it.

Jason C's point about practice is absolutely right though. But practice doesn't equal long hours. Practice equals practice. 3 hours of focused practice on the right thing is far better than 6 hours of practicing the wrong thing. Practice quantity isn't the secret, it's practice quality.

Here's a related post I wrote on "Making money takes practice like playing the piano takes practice":

http://37signals.com/svn/posts/1985-making-money-takes-pract...
It's pretty idiotic to try this on in the first place, given that theme code has to be under the GPL anyway.

I suppose one should give the author of this article the benefit of the doubt and assume that this is something they figured out for themselves, but there's a lot of prior art out there, e.g. [1], [2].

The other point to be made is that of course HTML output is not necessarily the only result of evaluating that obfuscated code (there could be side effects etc.), so a better approach would be to just run base64_decode on it so the source code gets returned, and then replace the obfuscated code plus eval call with that (and then modify it as desired).

[1] http://wordpress.org/support/topic/300761

[2] http://justfreetemplates.com/blog/2009/07/22/decrypting-encr...
Dear Steve Ballmer
You can look at the netflix's winners papers:

- Progress report: http://www.netflixprize.com/community/viewtopic.php?id=998

- Latest: http://cacm.acm.org/news/32450-award-winning-paper-reveals-k...

And:

- Recommendation Algorithm Wants To Show You Something New: http://science.slashdot.org/story/10/02/26/1821208/Recommend...
Actually, the video implementation in Firefox makes it extremely difficult to add support for other codecs. Word has it this is specifically so you can't easily add H264 support. So yeah.
Marvell announces $99 Moby Tablet to Revolutionize Education
Canada finally fixed their laws to make it easy for US-based VCs to invest up there. Couple that with the pretty easy visa requirements for people with technical degrees, and we should see a flock of serious startup entrepreneurs moving to Vancouver and Toronto.
Who said that H.264 encoding is entirely custom silicon? And why can't there be custom silicon if other less "hardware" (why do you keep putting it in quotes?) acceleration strategies exist?

You've been pushing this hardware angle hard, and the point is well taken. Yes, you can accelerate Theora if you write some new software. Not every mobile producer has the luxury of letting a third party do that (or putting the resources to do it themselves). But yes, it is possible.

So now all we're left with is that Theora is an inferior codec: worse quality, worse encoding options, more investment required to make it power efficient on mobile.

The industry has decided—with or without Mozilla—long before this question was ever asked. When Youtube started converting everything to H.264, the biggest player moved over. Now you see other smaller players moving to H.264 as well.

All MozillaCo's refusal is doing is ensuring that Flash continues to exist as a video solution for Firefox, playing H.264 and not giving HTML5 video support. The decision has already been made by the big sites!
But then I'd say "fire the workaholics" is still silly. Fire the unproductive workaholics.

Sure, there are workaholics who don't get anywhere, but that's a minority. Maybe it's common in SV though :/

>> "I run into people all the time who are putting in ridiculous hours and getting no where."

Were they not productive, or did their idea stink? A ton of the startups that get investment are just really bad ideas IMHO. Why didn't they recognize they weren't getting anywhere earlier, and make better decisions? Why didn't they change their idea, or the things they were focusing on?

Building stuff takes hard work, and sometimes crazy hours. If you're not being productive, then stop wasting time, but if you are able to put in more hours than the competition to beat them, it's going to pay off. Be a productive workaholic.

Google/Yahoo/Apple/etc just wouldn't have been built if people hadn't put in crazy hours. Same is true for most large companies.

I would say that yes, Google had a good idea, but they would not have succeeded without crazy hours. You need both.

But I also think Jasons point about "simple software" was valid. 37Signals is all about simple 'lite' software that solves the basic need, rather than taking on the massive hard problems, and that seems to be more why there's the 'do less' stance.
I don't think it's snobbish at all. I see these articles on HN from time to time: 25 Awesome jQuery Tips, Learn YUI Tools Now! and they always appear from some random blog that just seems to aggregate links from other sites.

I love jQuery, but I come to HN to learn about the internals of jQuery, or some other awesome optimization John Resig has squeezed out of JavaScript, not how to select all the div's in my document.

You're right, this article isn't for HN.
Sure a numbers game, but I know from experience there are people 10x+ better than others at cold calling. Its tough to make one adwords campaign that much better than another.
Marketcetera platform consists of the following components:

Photon - a light-weight GUI for entering orders, monitoring them and running strategies. Built on top of the Eclipse Rich Client Platform.

ORS - Server that includes an Order Routing System for accepting orders from Photon, StrategyAgent or Order Loader and routing them to an exchange, persistence layer backed by a database (MySQL is installed with the product) and authentication module.

Order Loader - for batch loading of large numbers of orders.
Strategy Agent - standalone environment for running strategies.

Platform modules - CEP, Strategy, Market Data Adapters (such as the Marketcetera simulated market data feed) and more.
Currently the Marketcetera platform is built on top of Spring Framework with an embedded ActiveMQ message queue middleware. Queues (i.e. point-to-point connections) and topics (i.e. publish/subscribe connections) are both used to communicate amongst the pieces of the Marketcetera platform. In general, queues are used to communicate messages going "toward" a broker or exchange, and topics are used for response messages going the other direction. This way we can guarantee that instructional messages - such as orders and cancels - are delivered once and only once, and informational messages - such as execution reports - are distributed to all authenticated clients. In addition, ORS publishes a set of Web Services interfaces used internally by the platform client components such as Strategy Agent, Photon, etc. We use Apache CXF technology as our web services framework.

ORS stores all of the trades, execution reports and positions information in a database accessed by the persistence layer. ORS is configured to use the MySQL database out of the box, but we are database agnostic and can be reconfigured to use any other database, such as Oracle or PostgreSQL.
Consider expanding your definition of a mobile device. I watch stuff daily on my iTouch, and I suspect lots of people will use a tablet device for the same.
That's interesting, because I remember David working like a dog on Rails both before and after it became popular while also working on your applications. Sounds workaholic to me, so why didn't you fire him?
hmm. I think you might be thinking of PNG, which to my memory was the codec developed as a response to patent issues.
I don't think the act of getting high and scribbling lyrics on napkins is exactly a low probability event for rock stars, so there could be a good chance this is actually true. :)
I like this recent wave of links to a shared doc so that information can fly faster than nested comments.
Funny how Calacanis is analyzing DHH's psychological (e.g. is DHH afraid of money?) reasons for not wanting to sell 37signals implicitly assuming that it's stupid & insane.
10 Places Not to Use Your Debit Card
It may be interesting to systems people who have never done front-end work so I wouldn't say it's not interesting to hackers by and large.

I'm sure all the Haskell guys want to gripe about the weekly "monads explained by pictogram" posts. :)

Honestly, I wouldn't worry about it and let the voting take care of it.
Well, I was wondering when this would start to happen. The spreadsheet is right now being blasted by spam, image memes, and profanity. It's a little like the neighborhood who gets too big to not worry if they locked the door or not. Growing pains, I suppose.
Some more

http://tradelink.googlecode.com/
http://code.google.com/p/tradelink/
http://eclipsetrader.sourceforge.net/
http://activequant.org/
http://code.google.com/p/truetrade/
Biologically speaking, the only "purpose" of every organism is to just to reproduce. I've always been fascinated by the idea of how our brain acts like a higher level abstraction on top of the rather slow process of evolution, since ideas evolve a couple of orders magnitude faster than plain old evolution.
"it's only a plane or two when you're physically needed there"

That's assuming you're from a visa waiver country. If you're from anywhere outside Western Europe, Japan or Australia/NZ, getting into the US is a hassle.
What purpose is lacking in jellyfishes, that isn't in cats or dogs?
Signaling is all well and good, but the license text is a terrible the place to do it.

"there's a human behind this, not just lawyers."

MIT/2-clause BSD isn't exactly pages of boilerplate legalese, either.
Nabble - integrate with gwt? / Threaded
"Sure, there are workaholics who don't get anywhere, but that's a minority."

I don't agree that the majority of workaholics are successful. My experience has revealed that the majority are tired, frustrated, and stressed out. And those who work with them feel the effects too. Workaholism isn't a smartbomb, it's a dirty bomb - the fallout is often widespread.

While everyone's definition of successful varies, burnout, frustration, and stress are easier to spot. Just ask the people around the sustained workaholics - they have the clear picture.

And just like any addiction, it catches up with you and destroys you or those around you. Maybe not right now, and maybe not in short spurts, but sustained workaholism will do its damage.

"But I also think Jasons point about "simple software" was valid. 37Signals is all about simple 'lite' software that solves the basic need, rather than taking on the massive hard problems, and that seems to be more why there's the 'do less' stance."

It is true. We solve problems with simple solutions. That is a conscious decision. It's not because we can't solve hard problems, it's because 1. we believe most of the problems people have are simple problems, and 2. we're not interested in solving really hard problems. We'd rather solve simple problems really well, profit handsomely, and get a good nights sleep.

Lastly, I don't believe there's more glory in solving hard problems than solving simple problems. The glory comes from solving real problems. Simple problems are just as real as hard problems.
And an even simpler one:

"".MethodNames().Where(m => m.Grep("index",RegexOptions.IgnoreCase)).OrderBy(m => m)