skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I wonder how applicable these concerns are to European debit card users, where Chip and PIN is more widespread - certainly in e.g. UK, Ireland, France etc. (though not e.g. Belgium, which have their own oddball system). Portable card readers are generally used for payments in restaurants, for example, so it's perfectly reasonable to not let your debit card out of your sight here.

Similarly, gas stations are often completely automated, and even where they aren't, you don't even hand your card over to anyone - you put it in the card reader yourself.

Online, my use is dependent on how much trust I have in the vendor. If it's Google, I use a debit card. If it's Paypal, I use a credit card.
As one of the motors behind The Small Business Web, thanks for the shout out! I should point out that our directory is a bit different than what the OP probably wants. It's a list of vendors who have signed the Small Business Web manifesto, which has certain requirements associated with it.

Of course, if folks here 1. serve small business, 2. with software, 3. that has an open API, 4. provide great customer service, and 5. believe in a free market of software, then you should sign our manifesto and join the Small Business Web.

http://www.thesmallbusinessweb.com

The Small Business Web is the bizdev, marketing, and technical people at these companies who are working together to build the market for small business SaaS.

-- Sunir Shah, Chief Handshaker, FreshBooks
Viacom vs. YouTube Lawsuit Meets Sergio Leone
Close, StackExchange is the whitelabel SO-derivative hosted by Fog Creek. But it is not what they are hoping to grow with VC funds, it's a separate entity than Stack Overflow proper, which is what they're trying to grow with VC funds. It's a little non intuitive but not terribly so.
Why not allow third parties to perform playing <video> tag?
> Why aren't gangs killing each other over tobacco and alcohol dealing?

[sarcasm] Because tobacco and alcohol are gifts directly from God, but pot gets shipped into the country on the express train from Hell packaged by none other than the Devil himself. Anyone that even looks at a joint is touched by the hand of the Devil and must be purged. [/sarcasm]

It never fails to amaze me how people seem to deny/forget that alcohol and tobacco/nicotine are drugs too. They just happen to be drugs that were sanctioned by the government as 'legal' instead of 'illegal.' Marijuana was added to the list of drugs in the 1920's (IIRC). Do you really think that there was much scientific though/research put behind that? Hardly. [Note: It was made illegal by an act of Congress so I'm sure you can search the archives for the minutes of the session] It was 100% a political decision, the same as the 'child porn' witch-hunts that we have today (where we are charging sex-ting teens as child pornographers). And because it's illegal it makes it even harder for researchers to actually do research on marijuana since they have to jump through all sorts of red tape just to make it legal for them to have it.
Submitting Hacking Applications Article
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You can enjoy both, but sometimes, and mainly due to lack of extra hours on the clock. The focus needs to be maintained on often divergent set of problems.

Not all programmers are very familiar with hardware issues, or dependent on their area of programming expertise on network design.

I also found that many programmers are oriented towards creating new features, while administrators focus on running established tools at maximum efficiency.

While drawing on the same set of qualities, the interpretation of them can diverge.

Some people posses both sensibilities and the mind space to treat both disciplines well in environments and projects that scale. They are not common.
Please don't tell this to the 150+ people who came out to the (Swing) dance I threw with the Dixieland Express. Nor to the scores of dancers that will be attending the Hot Jazz Jubilee in a few weeks.

The downfall of jazz as a genre for dancing began with an arbitrary dance tax. It continued with the era of "The Twist", which encouraged people to dance by themselves, and continued on into the disco era, which did more of the same. The Swing Revival of the 1990s helped bring brain-share to jazz (albeit of a neo-Swing flavour) again.

Partner dancing to jazz music is alive and doing very well. If you don't believe it, Google up Lindy Hop in your city.
I don't see how this will affect anything. Those who are still using IE6 had plenty of time to upgrade to IE7/8, what makes you think that once IE9 comes along, everybody will suddenly upgrade?
Would You Pay $20 for Access to a Breast Cancer Cure?
Agreed. Of course to a degree it matters what you mean by "excel".

In general, an expert program will not be a truly expert sysops because each of them is a deep field and developing truly deep expertise in either of them can be an almost all consuming task.

But, you can easily find people that are pretty good at both, and I would go so far as to say anyone who is good at one also already knows at least the basics of the other, they just might not be a true expert. Certainly anyone who is good at one has shown they have the right mindset and capabilities to become good at the other if they decided to.
IE9 on XP won't fix the problem, because IE6 will still run on Windows 7.
I actually think it was a fair point and an interesting one worth pressing on.

It's an compelling question to me because it asks what it means to maximize profit, which is typically given as the foundation of business (I believe DHH actually uses this definition in your interview). Is profit strictly money? Can it also be measured in happiness or other metrics? Objectively speaking, if you were to take a purely capitalist perspective I would assume you would be interested in maximizing money, and thus DHH's perspective could be viewed as you put it, religious. Assuming that profit can include more than just accumulation of money but also intangible assets (prestige, recognition, etc) than perhaps it's not simply a decision of a man standing by his ideals, but actually of one making the most sensible choice to maximize his profit.

btw, well done on the interview.
It's a niche viewpoint. I do want to live in an adsense world, as do most users. They find adverts useful.

>> "DHH has talked before about his opposition to ad-based businesses. It is bread crumbs on a per user basis. That means you need a huge number of eyeballs to profit. Building a system so large and popular that it gets that many users is difficult and there is a lottery factor."

I think basically, it's 'harder'. It's a harder problem to solve. But really, you can setup a profitable website in the right niche earning good money from advertising easily without requiring large number of eyeballs.
Charging for things works best in areas where there are weak or no network effects. In something like facebook, having half of the customer base drop out would be disasterous, because those remaining are left with a worse product - having all of their friends on it is one of the strongest features.

In small business software a la 37 signals, you don't care how many other customers are there except for the vetting it provides.

In landgrabs in a high network-effect area, you can't afford to charge more than one's competitors. Hence, advertising.
Emerging market entrepreneurs / investor matching
When the banks ask me if I want a debit card, I say no. I have a credit card and I have an ATM card that cannot function as a debit card. Much less risk for me.
I think it's worth realizing that it's tribal behavior as much as anything else. Corporate fiefdoms develop. Staff protect their turf. In my opinion many people are unaware of the likeliness that this is the result of evolutionary biology.

That said, the value of some level of specialization clear. We have to commit a lot of energy to the things we will become really good at. However that doesn't come without problems. In the scientific community there is concern that it's becoming harder to do cross-discipline research.

While we must accept specialization for practical reasons, and realize that there are also social and biological factors, there is value in encouraging cross-disciplinary experience, especially in leadership positions.

The programmers may like to critique the potential CTO as not as good a programmer as them, and the sysadmins may do the same. But I sorta think you want a CTO who can see the forest for the trees.

(Cue criticisms of dumb CTOs....Now! ;-)
Afaict jpeg, despite it's intentions, has still been dogged by a number of expensive patent fights.
When you don't expect much at the start, one person can do programming or sysadmin job first - if you're just hosting your own page without any special features. If you get to the situation where you have many servers to take care of (5+ let's say), then sysadmin simply becomes a full-time position that needs someone experienced with this environment. Someone who's mainly a programmer may not have enough real-world experience to deal with the potential problems, or might not know where to look for solutions. If you require quality, you'll need specialists at some stage.

Splitting the roles is also practical. At some point you may have a project deadline coming soon, when suddenly (for example) network fails - do you really want to send experienced programmers on a trip to the datacenter in that case?

Really, it's a question of how big you are and how much time does your infrastructure need...
This isn't The Mozilla Blog, it's Rob Sayre's blog at Mozilla. His name doesn't even get any hits at The Mozilla Blog. http://blog.mozilla.com/?s=sayre
I was confused for a moment until I realized you were likely talking about check cards issued by credit card companies; here (Canada), "debit card" refers to a piece of plastic given to you with your bank's name on it and a nonstandard serial number, that can't be used online in place of a CCN, and has always required a PIN number, even before chip-and-PIN was established.

Here, they have a much different fee structure than credit cards for supporting businesses, so some businesses choose to not support one or the other for small purchases where it isn't "worth it" to them. Also, there's no way to put a "hold" on this kind of card—it's basically an immediate wire transfer, not a cash advance, and the terminal you use a debit card in doesn't (can't) store anything that could be used to charge you further after the fact. Thus, they're much more widely used here, because the amount that shows up on the keypad is the amount your account will be charged, never more or less.

The only problem with them is that, unlike with credit or check cards, they have to be able to directly dial their own bank infrastructure (via an agreed-upon protocol, here called INTERAC) to function. Thus, in a foreign country, it's much easier to just use your credit card.
it almost means the same thing in this context as well :-)
How can we find the best freelance designer?
We are CS students & programmers who need the help of a designer to create an awesome interface for an app, but we aren't that rich.
Most people do not want to fuck around with their computer

Really? Back in the day (10 years ago) when I was crazy enough to do tech support for ordinary folks running Windows, it was rare I'd find someone who hadn't changed all their cursors, their window coloring, and their wallpaper, all to eye burning, heavily customized detail.

I'd guess the customization and theme changing is even more prevalent on something like Linux, considering the slightly better informed userbase.
Regarding your last line (which you maybe just meant as an aside), I'm a huge fan of all the artists I mentioned, so I hope I didn't give the impression that I think any of them are on some higher plane than the others. Just that I like them for different reasons.
10gen Announces First MongoDB Conference, MongoSF
I've used my debit card as my default method of payment online, in restaurants, at gas stations, etc. for about 15 years and have had very few problems doing so. Certainly no greater problems than simply using a credit card, in my experience. This article is almost entirely FUD, there aren't any truly good reasons to not use a debit card today.
I don't understand why you interpret my statements as absolutes. For example I said:

"In other words, his business is literally priceless in his mind because it gives his life meaning..."

I did not say "...it is the only thing in DHH's life that gives his life meaning..." I seriously doubt that 37signals is so central to DHH's existence (or any member of 37signals) that removing it from their life would prevent them from moving on.

I just responded to Calacanis with a similar point, but essentially I believe you are looking at business as a method to maximize _money_. My point is that perhaps when we talk about maximizing _profit_, profit can be defined as more than money.
It's not clear why he'd like native code access.

Is it that he doesn't think Firefox performance will be acceptable in XNA/Silverlight, or that he doesn't want to port any of the existing code to the CLR?
If I worked at Mozilla Foundation, I think I'd hope that the blog had been hacked - rather than that Sayre actually posted that.
I don't think it's BS if we're talking about professions rather than hobbies. Just because you do both doesn't mean that either one is a specialty.

All coders do some system administration as a matter of course, and the reverse is true as well. But to specialize in both is probably rare.
At a certain point you're talking about SANs, FibreChannel routers, HVAC systems, UPS, virtualization, etc etc, and keeping up to date on all of this knowledge is a job in itself. So a guy spending most of his time doing "big IT" sysadmin stuff might not have the time to become a really great programmer.

That being said, I know plenty sysadmins that have gone on to become great programmers. And truly great programmers tend to love computers, both software and hardware.

Larry and Sergey were apparently also server guys: http://www.flickr.com/photos/bsmif/3465464623/
Microsoft is making a business decision that makes sense.

For them.

For those of us who prefer not to DRM our machines to death, XP is going to be around for some time to come. Most folks like us stopped using explorer long ago.

This decision helps open source browsers gain greater market share so I welcome it.

Anything Microsoft does that helps open source alternatives is win in my book.

Thanks MS!!!!
Mozilla won't allow any kind of plugins for <video> because they want to force you to use Theora. You're getting freedom, and you're going to like it. (Because who doesn't want freedom?) The cost of the H.264 license is not the issue.
Today, in the USA, dealing marijuana is a crime. Making a (highly profitable) living off dealing marijuana is, at the very least, a "career of crime".

The individuals in this story did much more than deal in marijuana - they set up a business, made huge amounts of money, wasted it, acted irresponsibly, and were finally caught. Furthermore, they celebrated their exploits. The point isn't that dealing marijuana is crime, the point is that no light has penetrated the thick skulls of these young men. It seems to me that it is possible but unlikely that they will come to see the error of their ways.
> The comment about developers making work for themselves is also spot on. I answer a lot of programming questions, and the questions are always asked because the programmer has reached the end of a twisty maze of his own creation. Turn around, walk, spin around, and try again. You'll find a better solution.

This deserves to be repeated a thousand times.

How many times bad code and bad ideas stick around simply because those that came up with them can't even imagine that they could do without them.

I have run into this many times with people that try Plan 9, 'where is my pet unix "feature"?!?', guess what? It was not a 'feature' and it causes untold pain, and that is why it is not in Plan 9.

Just last week somebody was in the Go mailinglist asking why there is no preprocessor! sigh
I think a head to head comparison makes you look pretty good. It makes the iPhone UI look like it’s made of ugly jelly beans.

A joke, surely. For the Windows phone I'm seeing unnecessarily gigantic type set against irrelevant background images with no consistency amongst the other UI elements. The "head to head comparison" he links to is, itself, based on criticisms of Microsoft's UI by Edward Tufte.
Okay, that makes more sense, but it's not admirable in anyway and it's not something I would invest in. 37s has a tiny fraction of mahalo's uniques, but I can imagine it having more revenue and more potential.
Erm.... Microsoft is a business. They are required by law to consider their shareholders' interests above all else.
Leverage your community.
I have a lot of empathy with those levels, but I'd sum up my own programming career to date in just three:

1. Under-engineers everything.

2. Over-engineers everything.

3. Tries to find a balance (with maybe a 75% success rate today).

Or, to put it another way:

1. Writes simple but over-specific things.

2. Writes general but over-complicated things.

3. Aims for simplicity and generality.
Nope, he had only 10 hours a week to build it, and he made the Rails framework so he would be able to speed up development and meet the deadline.
How to Get Kicked Out of the App Store
The Case for Saturday School
I think it may be because many people think we do in fact know at least something about how nature works. For a non-intuitive example, we can prove two particles are identical, and if nature worked a different way it would show up in experiments.
I think it's a grey area :/ It's all about how much value/content you're adding, and whether those users would have been able to find those adverts without your help.
R programming annoyances
I'm curious—how are you connecting your logs/GA to people who saw your tv ad? Are you using a special URL in the ad?
When I moved to Seattle after college, one of the things that drove me nuts was how lame audiences were at music shows. A band would play a song and call for audince participation. They'd work hard to get people to clap along, or sing a chorus or something. If they really worked at it, they might get 1/3rd of the audience to join in, but as soon as the band went back to playing, the audience participation would die out.

A friend had a band who ended up with a gold record for their first album and a top 40 single. Most of their local shows were at 21 and over clubs. I asked him how he liked playing all-ages shows. He said the audiences were filled with pogoing teenagers which he found a lot more fun than playing to a bunch of still, stonefaced hipsters.

I agree, it can be annoying to have people near you singing so loud that you can't really hear the band very well, but really, if getting any sense that you aren't alone in the audience is a turn-off, save your money and buy a CD.
Isn't the sure fire way of validating an email address to connect to the mail server and see if the address exists?
There are so many adverts that "often" really needs to be backed up with hard data.
IE6 is packaged with XP. A large part of why it's around is that people who bought XP couldn't be arsed to upgrade to anything better.

If some corporate IT department wants to upgrade to Windows 7 but still reinstall IE6 over it for some crufty legacy app compatibility, I think they'll probably have much bigger problems that would make the OS upgrade pointless altogether.

Granted, Windows 7 currently ships with IE8, so we'll still have the same problem for a while.
Nah, Larry and Sergey were entrepreneurs, which meant they did whatever they had to to keep their idea alive. Which often included hardware design, sysadmin, algorithms, infrastructure, graphic design, accounting, investor relations and marketing. They sucked at most of it, but they were "good enough" to turn their idea into a multi-hundred-billion-$ company.

Those corkboard servers you show, BTW, were removed from service in a hurry once the fire marshal found out they were building servers out of corkboard.
Having to support decrepit platforms that nobody wants to program on anymore is part of being a developer. They will change, but they'll always be there.
Why Paid News Online Will Not Work
Bugtraq and vuln-dev for the more whitehat side, irc and zeroday forums (often invite only) for the blackhat side.
Patrick, what is the best way to contact you a la PM for startup advice?
Argh - too late to edit for clarity.

The assumption is correct - the mechanism for repealing a law is just like the mechanism for making a law.
> There is no reason why any call should have to end in a negative on either side. :)

Unless risking this would increase success in general. ;o)
Why Start-ups Fail at Marketing -- and Possible Solutions
Then sees the horrible mess that the FPGA dev tools are, and quits programming forever :)

Sorry, I've just been in a small personal version of hell for the last few weeks courtesy of Altera.
Sure, but the point is that in the beginning, they were arguably great at developing software _and_ building a server farm that worked. My main point was that until you hit the "enterprise" server stuff, you have the capacity to be both a good server guy and programmer.

Above a certain point, there are so many technologies you need to know that people need to specialize.
This sure did tick people off for some reason. Sorry. It's just a dinky little two paragraph post I tossed out there while I was drinking coffee.
Thoughts on Video Game Programming jobs
> Similarly, gas stations are often completely automated, and even where they aren't, you don't even hand your card over to anyone - you put it in the card reader yourself.

There have been reports of gas station card readers that recorded information for use by thieves.
I've found that the best sys-admins know enough programming to automate their jobs and debug application issues. They don't have to be the greatest programmers, but they're fantastic debuggers.

The best programmers know all the system settings, services, and behaviors that can affect their apps and thus have to know the underlying system.

I have yet to meet a truly great programmer who didn't thoroughly understand the system he was running, or a fantastic sys-admin who wasn't a pretty good programmer.
I have a duty to my namesake to bring this up :-) Peter Cooper (the 19th century industrialist and Presidential candidate - not me) pioneered the tuition-free education concept in the United States with the Cooper Union, which is still running today: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooper_Union - online universities are cool, but the Cooper Union is a full-on bricks and mortar college.
> I have a credit card and I have an ATM card that cannot function as a debit card. Much less risk for me.

I agree about the risk, but my bank won't give me an ATM card that isn't also a debit card.

What US bank still issue ATM only cards?
It's because this means all the PC users who stay on Windows XP will be perpetually using IE6/7/8. IE9 usage will only grow as adoption of Vista/7 picks up. In essence, IE9 will have slower marketshare growth and web developers will be forced to cater towards the XP-using masses for another 5 years or more.
And when you carry it at a walking speed you achieve a scale velocity of warp 2!
It's interesting that you use Lady Gaga as an example, because before she got famous, she was a...jazz musician!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_hHc7TZjyY&feature=relat...
It's actually a credit union, which is far better IMO than a traditional bank. I have a business account at a bank who wouldn't give me an ATM (non debit) so I immediately cut it up.