skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Note that consumer card rewards programS are paid by the merchant. Lowering the fees is unambiguously a good thing. I wish regulations were such that caps needn't be mandated, but barriers to innovative entrants are just so high.

I wish congress would regulate some minimum standards for merchant services. That space is a total clusterfuck.

Regulation should either be wise or gtfo. This layer on top of unwise regulations is unfortunate.
Richard Dawkins: Has Technology Hindered Human Evolution? [video]
Apple can only control their own store. The Internet is beyond control. You can block Safari via parental controls though. The real issue is what Apple wants to sell in their store. You can't goto a brick and mortar store and buy the latest issue of Hustler. I don't think anyone would argue Apple should have to sell porno DVDs next to the iPods in their stores. Jobs is simply saying for anyone who doesn't like it there are other stores to shop at. Seems reasonable to me.
If you'd like to look into it, I'd recommend the Didjeribone. Plastic, lightweight, sounds really awesome even compared to my authentic didj, and you can change its pitch.

As for the medical bills, well I was pretty young and felt invincible. That delusion was thoroughly shot down.
How often do you have rectal surgery? Yeah.

Try searching for "slept with" or something more common.
I'll remove it, as it's mistaken. Sorry, internets!

Slippery slope == fallacy is still true though, and it's still a wholly invalid standpoint.
I have to say, nice response from the CEO.
His straight no-bullshit response is commendable and will, for many people, distract from the ridiculous definition of freedom he uses.
Is Your Favorite Charity Spying on You?
Yup, took me roughly ten hours. I can also "pulse" breath, for more intense rythms.

I've been playing for a while now.
Yaa i am talking about government, not Chinese people. I know people are good, hard working.
Steve doesn't have to be convincing else he want to lose sales, and he doesn't care as much about sales as he cares about the product.

His is a common retaliation to Gawker's kind of criticism: the criticism that your creations ought to satisfy the consumer. This has always been bullshit. You should create what you think is right and then discover who the consumer is. The alternative is design by committee writ large and absurd, like Windows. You get something that even the creator hates.

Steve says the effect of "if you don't like it, buy something else" (almost in as many words, in fact). I hate that this sentiment isn't respected. So many people think they have a stake in something because they put it on their credit card.
Yes I'm really a huge fan of programmers of ZSNES. Could this one also cover up a few paragraphs each on different popular emulators, something from their creators - like what kind of problems they faced, any very interesting hack they put on to work. etc. etc

Sounds like a nice theme for a book.
Complain further up the chain. Nobody should be doing that, it's preying on the uninformed.
Extending byoung2's thought...
Right now there is no way to tie in comments/programmer conversation and code. It would be great to have a tool that could be added to svn,git etc which would allow programmers to attach comments to code in such a way that I could then ask for all conversations for a particular feature since that feature was created to any enhancments done on it.
...
Not to mention, the civil engineer's work can't be patched post-release, and tends to have more severe consequences if it's buggy.
Jobs' near terrorizing of his own employees is pretty well known. It wouldn't surprise me if he hasn't really had a long serious internal debate on this...with the answers well rehearsed and ready to go. Either he just likes endless conflict, or he's only just begun to hear these things direct.
The story of _why's vanished dog Bigelow
http://www.scribd.com/documents/8545174/Whys-Poignant-Guide-...
PyPy is the Future of Python
> "Apple's success is really quite easy to reproduce."

I doubt this...

They're not unbeatable, but let's be honest, a lot of money has been thrown at the "kill Apple" by some very large players with a lot of money and experience. No one has done it yet - I'm not convinced it's really simply a matter of determination.
maybe also get brainstrust.io
Good to hear, but that algorithm isn't LRU, and LRU makes more sense when backing a cache.
Seriously. Pretty reprehensible:

> “A number of critics have asked if monogamous homosexuals are also culpable. Quite apart from the question of the definition of monogamous (sexual contact with only one person in a lifetime? serial monogamy? some cheating? etc.), I suggest the following analogy: A man joins the Ku Klux Klan. He is not violent, and would never hurt a fly; he just wants a safe place to express his racist feelings. Is he culpable for the Klan's past acts of violence? I believe that even though he is not criminally responsible for acts that occurred before he joined, he is morally culpable for joining the Klan. The Klan has blood on its hands, and anyone who joins must share the guilt. So, too, with the homosexual movement.”
I have wrestled with this quandry for years, regularly alternating between Macs and Linux-based computers.

My personal choice is slightly more fine-grained - I use proprietary software, but will not invest in it, so as to avoid lock-in. I won't use anything that requires proprietary file formats. I use a proprietary text editor, but only because it offers a familiar vi-mode interface. I do a brief mental audit every few months - If I expect it to take more than a day to migrate to a fully-open environment, I know I've ceded too much control to software companies.

I think Stallman is a fundamentalist, but an important one. I think he prompts debate and exemplifies practice in a way that is only possible because he simply will not touch proprietary software. Seth Godin recently argued that one of the most underrated properties of the internet is its ability to show us the limits of what is possible and in that sense Stallman is vital. I see him as a figure like Heston Blumenthal or Ray Jardine - there aren't many people with a sous-vide setup in their kitchen or hiking the Appalachian Trail with an eight pound pack, but their example broadens all our horizons.
I think you've basically created a simple version of Quora but you dont have the experts who can actually answer interesting questions.

Most people just email their friends if they want to figure something out. Braintrust = gmail conversation thread. Plus that is completely private.

I think you need to pivot.

You need to find some type of job which answers questions. And create a way to allow the "answerer" to bill clients per conversation thread or per time or something. There are other solutions to this problem but its just an idea ...

Eg: Lawyers,

Best of luck with it!
"But after the paper is written up it has solidified and it becomes applicable science, and for the person calling the API that embodies the concept it has become 'mere' bricklaying."

I completely disagree.

The art for the person calling the API is often found in "building something people want." Think of the people who frequent this website. Many of them are writing lines of code to make something people want. Surely there is some art to that. There needs to be an idea, building something to show customers, and iteration on that idea taking customer response into account. The customers have input, but the programmer decides what to write.

Just as wealthy people once commissioned portraits and told the artist what to draw, programmers can be employed someplace where the question of what to program is decided by someone else. But there is nothing inherent in art prohibiting painters from deciding what to paint, or in programming prohibiting programmers deciding what to program.
Yep. It may have been about developers in the past, but it doesn't look that way going forward. The app store only needs so many apps, and there are tons of devs to fill in, no matter which technology isn't allowed.
I didn't read anything about the relation between greatness and bank accounts. It seems like you want to paint him according to your existing preconceptions. I read, "I really do take this stuff to heart, and you're telling me I'm just in it for the money.". I'd probably fire back something similar at 2 am (and regret it in the morning).
It's okay, as this thread is showing, you can always get all your karma back by just posting a statement about how you wish Jobs was your dad and how he really showed some blogger what for in an unnecessary back and forth that ended with him belittling the blogger for not being a billionaire.
Hmm. What about INFPs?
Porn malware is a solved problem, both on Mac OS X and on Windows, the latter if you use a reasonable browser. Neither of these feature a closed, App Store-like model.

Steve knows this, and -- considering he has porn in his App Store, behind the age limit -- he knows that his lines about porn on Android (also behind the age limit) are pure FUD. It's kind of embarrassing.
OSS software junk may get better press than it deserves. But there are many, many times more proprietary software junk. e.g. http://cd.textfiles.com/directory.html
Cool, thanks. That looks ideal -- it's already in use for the main Apache logs by default, just not for the sites I've configured under /srv/www/*.

A single line added to the apache2 file under /etc/logrotate.d and I think all my logs are covered.
So it's not about the curriculum? How else would this gestalt effect occur? I can well understand how treatment effects happen at the Naval Academy or at prep schools, but it seems most colleges seem to define their experience primarily by their curriculum.
I've heard Stallman's arguments quite a bit and every time I hear them they don't ring entirely true. Pratically speaking, the freedoms granted by free software are primarily meaningful to developers. If you can't modify the software (or have no concept of what source code is) these freedoms largely become meaningless. By the same token, if the source code is absolutely terrible the freedom to modify it is next to meaningless (I've had to deal with this issue a fair amount myself).

There seem to be a couple of implicit arguments in this that I find interesting. First, that others aren't to be trusted. Second, that software is in no way an invention.

Regarding the first, I think that for most people they have to rely on the developer of the software they use. If the developer decides to stop working on it they can get screwed. With open source software they may be able to find another developer, but then they are simply at the mercy of the other developer. Their lack of freedom isn't shaped by whether the software is open source or not, it's shaped by their lack of knowledge.

Regarding the second, it seems that the argument for free software is an argument for free speech. This in essence means that software is exlusively a work of creativity (an thus copyrightable) and is not a work of invention (thus not patentable). I don't completely buy this argument. I think software is unique in that it has aspects of both creativity and invention. On one end of the spectrum _why would definitely epitomize the creative aspect of software. On the other end, software paired with super computers and embedded systems certainly come closer to machines.

Overall, I these are tricky things to deal with. I don't think that all software should be out in the open, nor do I think that every piece of software should be cloesd away. I think the free software community needs to have a more nuanced view of the world and that having one will bear more fruit.
Funny you should say, a couple of days after I read http://www.duke.edu/~hpgavin/ce131/citicorp1.htm via hn: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1325393

I agree, though -- being responsible for people's lives has a certain je ne sais quoi when it comes to stress levels.
I predict that I would answer 'nothing' and then feel ashamed.

It makes me wonder why the two go together and whether I can break that link so I could answer 'nothing' and be OK with that.
Indeed it was the correct one. I've got it set up and everything now, thank you VERY much.
they need to fix that roof
Walls are totally not about introvert/extrovert, it's about the fact that if you get interrupted for 30 seconds, it can cost 15 minutes of productivity.

Walls make it more of an effort for someone to interrupt you.
https://graph.facebook.com/search?q=slept%20with&type=po...

No incriminating results I could find. (This search has a much higher turnover, so the results you see will be different from mine.)

My point stands: You're making accusations without solid evidence. Neither the "rectal surgery" search nor the "slept with" search prove that "a lot of people are being strung along in ways they don't understand".
I did not like that movie. It felt like the movie was building the whole time and then abruptly ended. They were trying to start a war and then all of a sudden the war was over.
Need salary advice; First time looking for a Rails job after a failed startup
Hey all. I'm a self-taught, 28 year old in NYC, and I've been programming rails for 2 years now. I co-founded an education startup where I was the sole developer, but I can't keep eating hotdogs and ramen after 18 months and being essentially homeless (I sleep on a friend's couch).

So now I'm looking for a job, but I don't know what to ask for as far as salary is concerned. I feel awkward asking for even $25/hour (#rubyonrails flipped out when I said that).

I'm not having that many problems getting interviews, but the part about the salary mystifies me. One HR guy asked me what salary I was looking for and I wasn't ready for that question at all, so I mumbled, "Oh, fourty... two... ?" and he said "... sooo, 50?"

So, one part is me not knowing what the salary range for a programmer is, let alone a rails programmer in NYC. I guess the other part is me selling myself short.

Since I'm self-taught and always worked alone, I don't have another developer or shop that can say, "oh, hey, this guy is smart". I also don't have enough OSS contributions or a stupid blog so no one can see that I'm not a complete idiot, but I feel like one because I've never worked alongside a competent developer who can mentor me in the areas that I'm lacking in (BDD, a smarter git workflow). When Ryan Bates and Yehuda Katz are your only metric with which to compare yourself, you feel pretty small.

Any advice is greatly appreciated!
>Regardless of if the software if free, you do have the choice to use it.

The problem with something like Facebook, though, is that choosing to use a platform other than Facebook for Facebook's purposes is useless, because the entire purpose of a "social network" site is lost unless a large number of people are using it. Most people aren't very technical, so they're going to use one networking site, and guess what? It's going to be what "everyone else" is using.

So, sure, you still have the choice to use it. But it's not like, say, system software, in that if you don't like the primary offering, you can go implement your own or download somebody else's.

That being said, I've still found absolutely no reason to use Facebook, and as such I don't.
"Bricklaying has been 'industrialized', and one day programming will be too."

This prediction has been made for decades now. I suppose if people keep predicting this indefinitely, someday it will become true.

In the meantime, new programming tasks are invented faster than the old tasks are industrialized.

"Once you get better at programming it is more like knitting or weaving than puzzling."

This is up to you. Was building Google, Amazon, Linux, Firefox, iPhone OS, etc. etc. etc. more like knitting or weaving than puzzling? Maybe what you are saying is that most programmers aren't good enough to build those kinds of products, or would just rather stick to their knitting and weaving. That I would agree with.

"Some programmers are better at this than others and can solve more complex problems."

This is trivially true of any cognitive task.
the algorithm to figure out left/right hemisphere dominance from MBTI type is pretty easy... J is left-brain, P is right-brain. there's some potential subtlety but that's the general rule
I do triathlons and marathons to get me outside and to challenge me to continuously improve my performance & health. You can geek out a good bit with all of the equipment and data that can be captured while training.
I quite like this idea. I'll have to consider it more when I'm a bit further along, thanks.
If I were lucky enough to be on the West coast, I'd be there. )-:
sure looks like it:

"It is the ninth fall by Foxconn employees in five months."
Even the mighty Android is no match against peurile developers. Witness the existence of gFart and droidFart.
An NES emulator will likely be one of my example emulators, broken down on a chapter-by-chapter basis. It's simple enough (ignoring the more complicated mappers) that it can be described fairly easily, and serves as a good example of implementing an emulator for a 2d console. As for the programming language, I'm having a tough time figuring out how best to present the examples to people; generally I write emulators in languages with heavy metaprogramming, e.g. Nemerle, Boo, Scheme, but these are all fairly tough for a standard programmer to learn along with emulation. For that reason, I'm sort of leaning towards Ruby + the LLVM bindings, but the performance is just dismal there, so I'm torn.
Great idea! I'm looking for the same situation but in NYC (and because I'm homeless).
Thanks for the support everyone :)

You're more than welcome to post this on your blogs or show your friends. I'd be super appreciative.
On the upside they probably have decent reading comprehension.
Ah - unfortunately I just relocated to SF from Brooklyn :P

Good luck in your home-hunt!
> "You should create what you think is right and then discover who the consumer is."

This is a fairly standard "engineering" view of the world. It is also why 90% of startups go out of business.

> "The alternative is design by committee writ large and absurd."

That is one alternative, but certainly not the only alternative. You could also get out and talk to your potential customers, find out what their problems are and what it would take to solve them, then build what THEY think is right. The nice side effect is you'll already know who the consumer is.

As a customer, I do have a stake in something when I put down my credit card. If a company doesn't respect me as their customer, you bet I will not be repeating my business.

However, the business can (and SHOULD) decide if they want me as a customer. If they don't, they should make it clear. I think Apple does this very well: You are given the Apple sandbox that is very well defined. If you don't like it, don't buy Apple (yet, people still do, then bitch forever about it).
Great idea man. Keep us posted.
I would say any startup CEO worth their salt. and most cases, esp on HN, they're actually involved in building it, not just telling people that it must be built.
I too enjoy Bowden's books and wish I could upvote you twice.
$85/hr minimum for contract work. $100K salary.

NYC has more money than brains so don't sell yourself short.
Interesting debate on whether programming is an art or science. Fwiw, programming isn't the first field which has undergone this argument. Even Bobby Fischer complained that chess had lost its artistry to a trend of mechanized memorization:

"Fischer Random was designed to remove the importance of opening book memorization. Fischer complained in a 2006 phoned-in call with a television interviewer that talented celebrity players from long ago, if brought back from the dead to play today, would no longer be competitive, because of the progress in memorization of opening books. 'Some kid of fourteen today, or even younger, could get an opening advantage against Capablanca', he said, merely because of opening-book memorization, which Fischer disdained. 'Now chess is completely dead. It is all just memorization and prearrangement. It's a terrible game now. Very uncreative.'[336]"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bobby_Fischer#Fischer_Random_Ch...
There's a big difference between responsibility and deserving the credit.
> they don't have to buy or develop or publish on iPads if they don't want to

That's a non-argument. Like saying if you don't like America why don't you leave. It's designed to shut down criticism. He's saying you should accept (or reject) the entire package without looking at details.

> and turn it into a why isn't anyone even close to competing on Apple's level missive.

It's certainly not because open platforms are unsuccessful, if that's what you're implying. You can find any number of examples of this.
I would broaden the criteria a bit. I think Jobs would accept the criticism of a Nobel Laureate, a Bob Dylan-esqe artistic figure, or any of the folks in the "Think Different" commercials. His point is fair enough. SJ has spent his life bringing new tech to the world and reshaping it in kind. He is a bad ass and knows it. The Gawker guy was making a 1/32 assed point, hasn't contributed anything of meaning to the culture (or even cultural debate) and was lucky to get a response from SJ considering. While he is milking the minor pageview spike this story generates, SJ is inventing the future.
I think we have a logic/emotion split about college, where logically we know college costs lots of actual money and should be regarded as an investment, but our emotions have been manipulated to think of college as a certain kind of life-validating experience.

So the decision to go to college is governed by the logic of college as investment, but then the content part is guided by the emotion of college as personal self-realization.

So we end up with a society where countless people pour thousands of dollars into attending college for fundamentally emotional reasons. Or even worse, for mistaken factual reasons about the practical benefit of their education.

In other words, as Ted Rall put it even before college costs doubled, college is for suckers:

http://www.metroactive.com/papers/cruz/09.26.96/student-9639...
I think you are stretching a little here. Jobs (to make sure we are talking about the same "he") never once brought in any mention of money. His point is a fairly common viewpoint: it's easy to tear things apart but much harder to build them; before tearing other people's things apart, try building something yourself first.

I, obviously, can't say what Jobs would consider great. I think that question is meaningless, though. If somebody asked me the same question Jobs asked, the definition of great would be my own.
I think your point has some merit, but what has Ebert really done? Has his criticism shaped film making in any tangible way? Has any critic in any field, maybe since John Ruskin? I know Ebert has had a rebirth in the tech community with his speech synthesizer and Twitter account, but really the guy opined on a syndicated basic cable and newspaper column for 25 years. His only significant innovation is the "Thumbs Up/Down" rating. Certainly famous, but influential or valuable? At least as it relates to a comparison with film makers of the day?

As a thought experiment, think of all the movies you can for the last 25 years, good, bad, weird. Probably a fairly large list. Now think of all the insights, or "Thumbs" ratings you can remember from Ebert? Or any other critic? How do they match up?
Marc-Andé Cournoyer (the creator of Thin) did something similar, I'd check it out: http://news.ycombinator.net/item?id=1159445
Here here! After witnessing N software fads with the pendulum of complexity and convention and configuration swinging to and fro, I firmly believe software crafting is much more similar to writing a book than constructing a bridge.

Preferably a book without any surprising twists. Or homicides. But extra chunky bacon.
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