skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's a pretty weird view, like arguing that a Dean of a science department ultimately gets credit for any important scientific advances his professors make, because he's ultimately responsible for the department's success as a scientific research institution, staffing, funding, construction of buildings, intellectual climate, promotion and compensation policies, etc., all of which are necessary for the research to take place and influence what kind of research is done.

CEOs, and Deans, do of course have influence on success, but I don't think a blanket, "all credit goes to the man on the top" makes any sense. One needs to investigate the extent to which different people actually contributed, i.e. whose contributions were minor, moderate, necessary, etc. Some executives of successful companies deserve a lot of the credit; others don't; depending on why the company succeeded, and what they or other people did.

And if you want to take a real capitalist-agency view, the CEO is merely another employee, and ultimately the owners are responsible for success or failure.
That's the worst part! It's a tired ad hominem and completely irrelevant to the discussion they were having. Jobs' argument for Apple's decisions should be convincing regardless of the accomplishments of the person he is (voluntarily) arguing with.
Sending a Message That You Don’t Care
Google provides a modified version of binutils that can create Native Client binaries. This should be enough to compile from any programming language to Native Client binaries.

As for LLVM: I believe the main challenge here is modifying the LLVM JIT compiler to produce Native Client-friendly machine code.
He was marketing _Why, not his real life persona.

And that in fact made _Why a stronger brand.

Have a look at the band 'The Cure' and Netochka Nezvanova.

Both of them were amazing marketeers, and _Why worked very much in that spirit.
Skiing. Running. Juggling. Playing piano.
I found that climbing strengthened my wrists and reduced the nagging tendonitis I would get from using a mouse.

Bouldering is unique because while some people do it alone, others consider it the most social form of climbing.
Charging what the market will bear is the duty of sellers in a free market. This has nothing to do with a platform being closed or not. Open platforms don't exist outside the market, they compete in same economy that the closed platforms are in.
some previous HN posts on the subject:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1306434

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1326167
So I presume you have started a company based around your ideals? I think people don't realize that there is no magic fairy dust at 1 Infinite Loop. Apple's success is really quite easy to reproduce. It only takes one thing: guts!
I have a rock band and I do mountain bike too. Outside hobbies rule.
The value of Windows is not in itself, but in the applications that run on it. The greater the market share of Windows, the greater the utility of the applications. The greater the market share of Windows, the greater the incentive for applications to be created for it.

So, to be contrary, their monopoly was good. See also the iPhone.
I think education should be centered around what a child wants to learn and explore instead of a fixed set of things that should learned.

Who decided that memorizing multiplication tables is more important that learning how to make music?

Personally, I agree with Murray Rothbard that education would be a lot better off without all of the coercion.

Human beings are natural learners. Is being made to sit at a desk for hours listening to what someone else thinks you should learn really the ideal way to learn?

Far more people come out of our schools unwilling to learn than go in that way.
Some guesses:

One reason might be that the existing range of news portals is good enough for most people to get approximately personalized content. People can find one or more news outlets, aggregators, or blogs that more or less reflect their interests, whether it's HN, Reddit/Subreddits, Slashdot, CNN, Fox News, DailyKos, Lambda the Ultimate, or whatever, and they just read those, supplemented with links passed on from their friends via Twitter/Facebook/etc. So your market is the people who can't find any combination of those that works for them, which maybe isn't a ton.

A different reason might be that Google News does personalization (via the "Recommended" box), and so already captures a decent part of the market for news personalization, at least in the newspaper-articles sense.

A third might be that it's hard to do well. To really catch on, people need to rarely get articles they don't care about, and often have this feeling of, "yes! this is exactly the kind of news I want to read, and which I wouldn't have found otherwise". That's probably hard to do! The Google News recommendations don't really blow me away, for example, even though I've been using it long enough that it should have decent data by now.
OK, so are you saying he has these kinds of debates at Apple with his fellow coworkers and then goes home and continues to have the same debates at 1AM with the rest of the world? Instead of doing... anything else?

I'm willing to believe that as a possibility. As in physically possible. You don't find that at least a little surprising though? Really?
Are you somehow suggesting that _Why disappeared because of the GP and 'his kind'?
He was referring to porn apps in the store.
Asking groups of people if they want something is generally a useless idea. It only tells you that some don't, some do, and others are undecided.
_why really is a brand then.
Slagging someone who approached computing the way Alan Kay has tirelessly advocated for his whole career by pointing out how short he falls of Alan Kay seems a little, uh, un-Alan-Kay-like.
I think that line clarifies what people in the tech industry seem to be missing in this whole controversy: It's not about developers.

It's about users, and creating a great experience for them. Developers getting upset about flash not running on the device, apps getting rejected, etc--that's just an unintentional side-effect of putting the user first.
1) Yes, it is possible to subclass the ModelBackend. That's not the only step involved in switching from username based logins to email based logins, however, since the default User definition has defined a required username CharField that takes some hackery to get around.

2) Symfony does the same thing with a one to one User <-> Profile relationship. I find this to be a silly hack in both frameworks that creates extra database JOINs for no reason. If I want to place a foreign key on the user table because multiple Users can belong to a single Account, I shouldn't have to go through an additional join table.

3) You can configure Doctrine to raise an exception if you try to save() a model object with invalid fields, and check if the fields are valid at any time with isValid(). It makes a lot more sense to me to do this at the model level since there are many scenarios where you still want validation and aren't actually using forms of any sort.
Re: TC not being on the bandwagon...

TC wrote about them when all they did was accidentally raise a small of money for a mediocre idea during a particularly bad PR shitstorm for a major web service. Why should a media outlet be on anyone's bandwagon, let alone a product that doesn't even exist yet?

Re: Nerds...

Srsly? All the nerds I know call themselves and one another nerds all the time. And geeks. And occasionally fags, if you want to get real about it. Terms of endearment.

Re: Traction...

Don't mistake hype for traction. I've more than half a mind this BS will blow over in 2 weeks, like Plurk when it challenged Twitter.

All in all, fuck 'em. Why bother talking about it until they release a product, get users, raise a real round of funding, and find a way to make enough money to run a web service? The premature attention does them no good whatsoever; they should be left alone to build something if, in fact, they're going to build it.
I saw a few years ago a study which claimed professional programmers had the second or third highest average IQs of any occupation. Probably depends on how you measure, but you get my point. After 10 years of programming, it's only gotten marginally easier. The fundamental stuff of programming, solving highly complex and abstract problems, never seems to go away. Somehow I doubt bricklayers can say the same.
I totally agree with you. That seemed to shut up the Gawker blogger. You can't please everybody and it isn't worth trying. And if you try to, you end up with a crappy product nobody wants and it's so far from your vision of what it should be. It takes guts to do what Jobs does. He's not doing this to be Mr Popular.

Despite what you may think of Jobs, he's pulled his company from horrible performance and has created value over and over. Anybody can talk smack and criticize. It takes will, dedication and passion do create.
What prevents the Great Firewall from whitelisting pings from these machines?
Actually, I think it's fairly well known that there's a tension between two real concepts of 'freedom from' and 'freedom to'.
Look at http://www.paulgraham.com/knuth.html for a discussion of computer programming as both art and science.
Yes, that is what I'm suggesting.
That's why I'm sticking with Python even if Django isn't a perfect fit for me.

call_user_func_array(array($object,'method_name'),array($arg1,$arg2,$arg3));

is literally the most retarded syntax I've ever seen for invoking an object callback, and is indicative of PHP's roots as a non object oriented scripting language.
Every school that plays competitive college football advertises on TV during those games (if not also at other times). This includes Stanford, Notre Dame, UCLA, USC, Berkeley, and plenty of other great schools.
True enough, I concede that it is un-Alan Kay like, but then again, I definitely am not Alan Kay.

I just think that there are plenty of people that have done a lot more for programming in general than _Why (or however you spell it 'properly'), and that to exaggerate like this is not helping at all.

Plenty of people are busy today doing very interesting stuff, let's go and talk about that instead of endless pouring over the ashes of one very briefly very productive programmer, artist if you wish.

He choose to limit his contribution, I have heard more about _why and how fantastic his works are since he quit than I ever did before.

Too much fandom, which in turn actually does _why a disservice because it turns off those that would otherwise still be open minded.

edit: it is precisely because of the similarity in goal that I mentioned Alan Kay by the way, and I think Alan Kay has gone about it in a lot more structural fashion that _why, he's also still at it instead of taking his toys home because people won't play his way.
> cat pictures and silly songs are actually just another form of pretentious self-importance.

Or they're a form of art. Out of one side of your mouth you say people should do things besides programming for fun, then when they do you call it self-important.
Nothing, but why would they bother?
I think the comparison to a dean is superficial, if not disingenuous. How many deans involve themselves in so many details of product creation and strategy? I see very little commonality between the roles beyond sitting at the top of a hierarchy.
Convenient & Healthy Cooking With a Health Grill
I hate the Facebook apps!-iPhone apps!-social games!-iPad apps! gold rushes as much as everyone else, if not more, but it can be both.

Apple doesn't legally owe gold rush developers a livelihood, but the ethics are not so clear cut, especially when they pull a Facebook-like policy switch after people have already invested.
Programming is part craft, part science, and occasionally a very small dash of inspiration or art.

But for the most part I think that a very large amount of it is very comparable to bricklaying. Especially in the part where most people in the IT world make their money, such as software for the financial and the business world.

Rarely does it elevate itself to the level of watchmaking and even rarer do you find art. It does happen though, but not often.

I'm sure that programming is conceptually different from bricklaying in a sense that we are solving puzzles, sometimes. But everybody that got in to it for that reason knows that the only time you really need that skill is when you've messed up and you are facing a very tough bug.

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

Of course there are different styles of programming, and there are only so many kinds of brick. But programming for the most part is hard because we have chosen to make it hard. If bricklayers had to create each and every brick from clay and bits of stone then you'd be much closer to what programmers do for a living than what bricklayers do.

Bricklaying has been 'industrialized', and one day programming will be too. It will probably still be marginally harder than bricklaying, even after that has happened. But if you can explain what you want done and in which order then you are essentially programming.

People often say they would like to learn how to program but they are not smart enough for it. And plenty of programmers just love that because it makes them appear special.

But I think anybody can program, the difference is not some binary switch in your head 'programmer/non-programmer'. The difference is in how complex an arrangement you can create, and that's a continuum.

Some programmers are better at this than others and can solve more complex problems.
yep, a good bout. you're also one of greg's kids aren't you?

just to round it out with videos of the other weapons:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eXQkdFQ6Upc

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cJGG8gR7mlI
Point me toward a CEO who's more intimately involved with their company's products than Jobs.
Don't understand the cynical flamebait language. What's the difference between sycophancy and genuine admiration? Can a guy be a fan of another guy's work without being a sycophant? Maybe you don't get it. Fine, I don't really get Jackson Pollack, but it's no big deal to me if people like him.
There is simply no such thing as freedom from the option to watch porn if one wants to watch it.

You're missing his point. There's nothing on the iPad that prevents you from watching porn if you want to - Safari on iPad goes to the same porn sites as any browser anywhere else. What he's referring to is protecting your machine from porn adware, and providing effective parental controls.
Yes, it's well known that there is an ongoing attack on the liberal idea of freedom which seeks even to destroy basic terminology.

They're the same kind of people who made the word "liberal" mean "socialist" or "interventionist" which is something of the opposite of its original and true meaning.

But the fact is freedom has a simple and plain meaning, and it's a meaning we need to have a word for. If you want to say that police stopping you from using marijuana is good, whatever, just make up some other word for that because that's the opposite of freedom.

Or if you think people have the right to "freedom from want" at the expense of others, it's nothing but a nasty and misleading rhetorical trick to call that freedom. It may or may not be good, but you're taking away people's freedom of choice when you force them to provide for the poor. Force is not freedom, it's force, end of story.
Do as I say, not as I do... but.... I love this

When you don’t create things, you become defined by your tastes rather than ability. Your tastes only narrow and exclude people. so create.

— Why the Lucky Stiff
No wonder you're angry then. Ok, that makes me understand your position in this thread a bit better. Thanks for the explanation!
Look, I generally agree with Steve. I have no serious problem with how he runs the app store. I think he's providing something that his customers want.

But are you telling me parental controls -- i.e. software to restrict the freedom of children -- should in any way be called freedom? For better or worse, restricting people is not freedom. What I'm saying is it's perverse to use words to mean their opposites.

And BTW, as you surely know, porn apps are restricted in the app store. He thinks that is a way of protecting users from porn. It may well be the right decision, but protecting people from themselves is not increasing freedom.
you're right, i don't, but that's where the phone point is, so i'm kind of stuck with it unless i re-cable the house somewhat.
Faile & BAST Deluxx Fluxx (Post-Modern Arcade) [video]
What is the simple and plain meaning of freedom?
There is currently a show in NYC:
http://www.deluxxfluxx.com/

More gallery photos [flash]:
http://deluxxfluxx.com/london/index.php?id=arcade

Looks like the cabinets have each been tricked out with custom games in the same art style.
Yes, you're correct. What I meant was more along the lines of what does college actually do in and of itself when you subtract all the factors that go along with those that go to college vs. those that don't. I wonder this because I've always been very hard working and consider myself reasonably successful, yet never went to college.

It's funny that you mention playing video games and posting HN as I just stopped playing Portal and thought "I should work on a project" and then fired up HN.
Well if it made sense I'd say something about the difference between critics and creators. Ebert is respected in his field even though he hasn't made any movies.

In this case, however, I think Steve was just lashing out against this guy's sense of entitlement. Tate also had a narrative fallacy problem.
He tells people what to build. He's very good at it, but he doesn't build things himself. Vision is cheap; negative taste [1][2] is easy; it's the implementation that counts.

I have no problem valuing the industrial engineers who figured out how to make the iPad 13 mm thick more than Jobs who decided it would be 13 mm thick.

[1] http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/2taste
[2] http://blog.fawny.org/2010/04/12/appletype/
I was responding there to the much more general claim krav made that CEOs deserve ultimate credit for the success of successful companies, as opposed to the narrower claim that Jobs in particular does. I wouldn't give Jobs as much credit as most people, but I do agree he is much more hands-on, and thus deserves a lot more credit, than the average CEO (I still wouldn't call him a "builder and hacker", though).

I do think that many CEOs are approximately as involved in day-to-day operations as Deans are, with primary responsibility for the financial/governmental/organizational side of things (budgets, personnel, lobbying), and very little involvement in anything technical. Due to lots of family working in it, I have a decent impression of how much credit CEOs in the oil industry deserve for the success of their companies, and how much knowledge they have of petroleum engineering in even its high-level aspects; the answer in both cases is, not much.
Pasted from the dictionary:

> the power or right to act, speak, or think as one wants without hindrance or restraint

Or in my words "not being restricted or forced".
I can't speak for academia - it's an island I have no wish to ever visit again.

Great companies or teams aren't happy accidents. They require leadership, vision, and execution. I wouldn't want to work with Jobs - but I admire what he's done. Apple would not be here without his vision and leadership.

On leadership, yeah, I do believe that ultimately, a leader is responsible and accountable. Whether it's the leader of a fire-team in Iraq, the leader of a country, or a four-man startup in Mountain View.

My very personal view: we'd be better off as a society if leaders were held responsible for success and failure. I see too many leaders / ceos / politicians taking credit for success and pointing to anybody but them for failures.
Lightweight living, a minimalist lifestyle, or whatever you want to call it represents maximum freedom for some people. If you come across adventure or you decide you want to move, you can do whatever you want at the drop of a hat.

I'd say it's best suited to people who don't have a family, sedentary lifestyle, or hobbies that require a lot of stuff.

In late 2007, I got rid of my place and everything I owned to travel indefinitely with only a laptop, HD cam, four shirts, a pair of pants, and two pair of underwear/socks. My worldly possessions weighed 14 lbs and occupied a backpack smaller than the L.L. Bean that hauled my books in high school.

Over the course of the preceding 6 months, I'd realized I never actually used my kitchen, living room, couch, TV, or pretty much anything else in my place. I would get home, play guitar and drums, use my computer, sleep, and leave.

So I got rid of it all, and the feeling was one of total liberation. I haven't looked back, and after 3 years (including a move to SF), I've added a small acoustic guitar and shed the HD cam.

I also realized that an apartment is mostly wasted space for someone who spends most of his time outside and around town, so I got rid of that too and sleep in my car.

Long story short, I've found getting rid of excess to be liberating, productive, and addictive. Highly recommended.
except right below that in the definition:

"The phrase "freedom from" can have as an object: fear, want, hunger, pain, disease, stress, depression, debt, poverty, necessity, violence, war, advertising, addiction, etc."
the opposite of its original and true meaning.

You're using the word "true" here in the same sense as others do in phrases like "the one, true god". I'll step forward and be the heathen to the absolutist concept you idolize...

But the fact is freedom has a simple and plain meaning

...actually, like many words, it has several. I opened my dictionary and can count seven different nuances in the entry. Here's the one I believe it was used in, and I see no problem accepting the intended semantics:

"(freedom from) the state of not being subject to or affected by (a particular undesirable thing)"
I'm very much not. I assume you are?
Think you might have read it wrong. This is an article about High-Paying, Low-Stress Jobs which is what is says a CSE is.
That was one of the saddest movies I have seen. A great film, very well shot, good sound track, good actors. However, I don't have a desire to see it very often, because it just depresses the hell out of me.

Darren Aronofsky's other movie -- Pi is also great. Highly recommended.
I liken this problem to browsing a library or bookstore vs searching its card catalog or asking for specific information. If I have a problem, I know what I want and it may not be something I've wanted before. If I want to relax and browse, I often want something different than I've wanted before.

So I think it is a hard problem, as said here, serendipity is hard to program. However, I am absolutely sure we have not yet figured out the best way to browse. Search seems pretty good, but internet browsing can easily be too time consuming and aimless.
I suppose you think that "freedom from freedom[1]" is a type of freedom?

[1] This instance of the word "freedom" means "not being restricted or forced"
trapped? or addicted?

seriously, if you're going to lose them if you leave facebook, they may not actually be your friends.

and haven't we all been through this before? I do recall leaving friendster for myspace and then myspace for facebook. I can't recall thinking that the government should have stopped that from from happening.

which is the real reason for regulation/monopoly. keeping those pesky competitors out of the picture while pretending its to protect the customers.
I enjoy home improvement. I head over to Home Depot most Saturdays. My daughters (8 & 10) go with me and we talk about the various interesting things we pass in the store. After we get home, they often like to help out with my home improvement projects, which makes it even more enjoyable.