skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's a nice unexamined assumption: "our own information". Not only do you have the idea that you can own information, but you come to "own" information merely by the fact that the information itself concerns you.

Next, "people don't want information about their movements to be publicly available". The question isn't what people want, but what people are entitled to.

I understand the legitimate use of secrecy (in the short term) to, for instance, hide one's suspicious-but-innocuous (or illegal-but-harmless) activities from the government. But even in the long term, let's imagine that every stoner in the United States has undeniable proof of their ongoing possession and use of marijuana made public. What's more likely to happen--that the DEA will swoop in to arrest all of them or society will realize that would be silly and hypocritical? Getting from the status quo to that point is just a question of game theory, and whether those with power will be just as exposed as those without power. Hard problems, sure, but the old bargain (we'll keep secrets and let you keep yours) is due for renegotiation.
The problem is that often (not always), proprietary software is just better than any free equivalent. I will gladly sacrifice some freedom to gain quality.
$25 per hour is pretty low for NYC I think. In another part of the country it would be fine. That's assuming a 40 hr / week job which helps offset some things like health insurance.

If you can't find a job then you could consider contract work. You will likely need to ask more than $25 / hour no matter where in the country you live.
Google's support sucks, but it's not like, say, Verizon is known for prompt and friendly service. Waiting so long to set up a phone line didn't do them any favors, but it was all about post-sale support anyway. I really don't think that had a big impact on sales.
pretty cool if you do a 'meet android' im feeling lucky search
In 1999 the suicide rate in China was 13 per 100,000 so my suspicion is that this story has only been up-voted for mud-slinging purposes. I'm a bit disappointed to see it on the front page — it doesn't strike me as being Hacker News.
Marlon Brando is a much better Don Coreleone than the Zuckerbergs.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWKG6ZmgAX4
I've found his contributions outside of Ruby to be also valuable: he wrote a very interesting minimal webserver in the Io language. Just reading the code to it opened my eyes to a way to solve a problem in some Io code I was working on. And the language he designed, "Potion", is very innovative. The stuff he's created is valuable as art, but if you must insist on programming as science, I'd argue his unique way of thinking has also pushed the boundaries of programming as a science in the way that calculus changed people's ways of thinking about math and physics.

As for his strange charisma, I would say _why is to programming as Ramanujan was to mathematics. There were western mathematicians who were so fascinated by Ramanujan, that even when he was wrong, they suggested that perhaps he was "right" in some higher plane of reasoning.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramanujan
> Instead, try to make things people want.

Because, considering human nature, that is a much better defined and more static goal than "kill Apple."
Of course no one is "forcing" you (at least in the general sense) to use Facebook. My point was that if you want a social networking site, switching to some fair, free and open alternative doesn't go as smoothly as switchin.g something like an e-mail client or a text editor
I'm admittedly short on my knowledge of this newfangled "lean startup" notion. But, it sounds to me like the fundamental principle is "lazy product evaluation." Ie, instead of building anything up-front, go out, find out what people want, and build that, MVP, reacting to markets that you know, provably, to already exist.

At the risk of getting told I don't "get it", this sounds like a great way to build a very successful but horribly boring startup.
The difference is Obama has charisma
To give you an example of why starkfist would say something like this, you only need to look at @_why's last few tweets:

"programming is rather thankless. you see your works become replaced by superior works in a year. unable to run at all in a few more."

"if you program and want any longevity to your work, make a game. all else recycles, but people rewrite architectures to keep games alive."

"an ascending homage to fish bones. culminating in a delicate canopy of mouse furs."

... Okay, maybe not that last one. Anyway. He was obviously contemplating all of the stuff we've created around software, and was pretty bummed out by it.

Not that anyone will know _exactly_ why he disappeared, but still.
I've been casually using this for the last couple weeks. It's really slick for what it does (multiple simultaneous conversations with the same group of people) and has some neat touches like upgrading comments to standalone discussions when people start to discuss them.

Congrats on the launch.
Google's?

It's an ad made by TBG Digital for Vodafone. They've made similar sites for Vodafone's other (non-Android) handsets too.
There's nothing to challenge. You've made a statement of your opinion, and you've stated it in such a confrontational way that nobody wishes to engage you with a response.

Maybe rather than saying 'wow' and laughing, you should consider why the things that you say cause others to want to exclude you from the conversation, rather than reply.
This is really old, nice linkbait though.
I've been all over using tmux (http://tmux.sf.net) for remote pairing basically all day long. It's like a reincarnation of GNU Screen that shows internal cohesion and makes more sense.
I assume it just means that Google will stop pushing it through their webstore.

I'd be very surprised if they actually prevented you from buying the phone unlocked. After all, you can buy pretty much all HTC smartphones unlocked through sites like http://www.htcphonestore.com
The site isn't particularly interesting, but it does highlight just how important Android is in the UK. Relative to the US, our market is fantastically competitive. Four networks offer the iPhone. Every network offers heavily discounted tariffs if you don't want a subsidised handset and just about all handsets are offered on a prepaid tariff with no minimum term. Handsets are rarely exclusive to any network and it's standard practice to haggle quite aggressively with the networks.

There is a vicious smartphone price war at the moment and Android is a big driver of this - T-Mobile are currently offering a choice of two Android handsets for free on a $30 tariff and the other networks aren't far behind. With the cheapest iPhone deals costing twice that, Android is running all over the place. The competitiveness and diversity of Android fits so well with our market conditions that I can't see Apple maintaining their market position for much longer. Android is being informally marketed as "just like the iPhone, but half the price", which is a bit of a death blow IMO.
I'd put it differently.

Listen to everybody. Ignore most of them.
From May 8th, 2009: http://gawker.com/5245852/randi-zuckerbergs-excellent-new-yo... (at the bottom)
By writing part of python in python, they are avoiding repeatedly going to the C layer. Is that what makes it faster - fewer round-trips ?
Really Google suffered from not putting an end to those ridiculous $99 phone pre-launch rumors. It was not reasonable to expect them to sell a phone at a huge loss per device just to expand the reach of their platform.
Google would rank infinitely higher on the "is a utility" scale.
Or vice versa. Every ying needs its yang.
if you're curious and want a technical read not filled with BS about how amazingly foreign and magical MD6 must be, just read this or the equivalent from mcaffee or whoever you prefer - http://tools.cisco.com/security/center/viewAlert.x?alertId=1...
I love that added incentive on top towards small banks: this only applies to the biggest banks. It's a small, but clever, change.
I haven't had a regular rails job yet either, but have done some failed facebook apps, also coding alone. never quite got into BDD either. have a decade of web app experience before Ror.

just got a contract job in Silicon Valley for a very decent hourly rate, a bit more than 1.6 times what I was paid as a salaried startup employee. I pulled that rate out of my hat and can probably get more.

I'd do a lot of interviews if I were you for both contract and permanent and you'll be asked what salary you're looking for. State a figure and see if they continue the process. If they do, its in the ballpark. If that happens a lot, you've got good evidence. Raise the rate and see if they still go for it.
All that makes sense in the context of a company. Startups don't really have time for it. If you're going to burn into the ground inside of 6 months, there's simply no room for training.
Vision is a critical part of a leanstartup and by no means is the fundamental principle "lazy product evaluation".

To quote an Eric Ries post:
"Lean Startups are driven by a compelling vision, and they are rigorous about testing each element of this vision against reality."

The two most important leanstartup principles or teachings for me are
a) I'm stupid and make really poor assumptions all the time. To combat that, I need to continually be validating my ideas against real customer feedback.
b) Validated learning is the most important metric for progress. Ultimately my company be successful if I understand better than anyone else the lives of my customers as that in-depth understanding of their hopes and dreams and pain will enable to build and market products which speak to those emotions.
I don't think dropping "Computer" from "Apple Computer, Inc." is really a dramatic change that takes guts.

Anyway, Microsoft is a soft and pretty easy target. Your critique of Google's efforts with Android, please?
True, but Woz doesn't go around writing snippy e-mails that ask "What have you done lately?"
What does it mean for Unladen Swallow? Can they both be used together? If Unladen Swallow merged into Python 3, then when using PyPy will one get a performance boost from both?
Which would also place you in the vast minority of the general population
Django is great, as is Webfaction, but if you're getting 100's of queries per minute, Webfaction probably isn't the host for you.
It seems like eventually it should be the JIT that will make it faster. Not only that, the JIT compiler is itself automatically generated. That is black magic indeed!

Here is the summary in their own words: (http://codespeak.net/pypy/dist/pypy/doc/jit/index.html)

---

When PyPy is translated into an executable like pypy-c, the executable contains a full virtual machine that can optionally include a Just-In-Time compiler. This JIT compiler is generated automatically from the interpreter that we wrote in RPython.

This JIT Compiler Generator can be applied on interpreters for any language, as long as the interpreter itself is written in RPython and contains a few hints to guide the JIT Compiler Generator.

---
"Foxconn felt sorry over the death," he said.

Is it just me or is there very little emotion translated over with this quote?
Jobs offers freedom from porn
Why wrestle with it even for a second?

If a piece of software is useful, use it. If it's useful enough to pay money for, pay money for it. It's just not an area that requires ideology to enter into your decision-making process in any way.

As you've noted, they've got a guy on the internet saying every possible thing there is to say. Do yourself a favor and ignore pretty much all of them.
Indeed! There can be a joy & delight in writing an HTML (or XML) parser. I love that the libxml still has a quote at the top:

"Programming with libxml2 is like the thrilling embrace of an exotic stranger." Mark Pilgrim

That sort of excitement is not just an engineering one.

And, of course, some artists choose not to even write HTML parsers, but to do things more strange, more beautiful with their code. And that is where things really change, and really get exciting.
It's not just you, but I heavily suspect translation and/or social norms are at play.
People are down-voting because it's he starts out saying "Is it just me or does this not really seem like that hard of a problem" which is just not true. He then suggests two bad ideas.

The gravel idea is especially bad. That's like saying you're going to shut down an industrial fan on the floor of a arena by dropping a box of packing peanuts onto it from the ceiling.

The down-votes are people saying "Yes, it's just you. It's a hard problem. Read about it some more and you will see why." Just because it looks simple on Youtube it doesn't mean it's simple.

I don't see why you bemoan Hacker News for down-voting a comment that is effectively a waste of time. It's a slap on the wrist. That's OK. Next time, he'll read more about it and think the idea through more before commenting.
Amazing quotation.

Like you say, art vs. science is a false dichotomy. Programming seems like both because it is about design -- the intentional and intense, the passionate blending of art and science.
I don't think that's necessarily true. From what other people have said, there are large quantities of oil spreading underneath the surface of the ocean. While some parts of the oil may be lighter than salt water, I think (disclaimer: no background in the subject whatsoever) that a good portion of the oil is actually heaver.

I bet there is huuuuge pressure behind the oil spewing out.
Http://www.mishkaproductions.com/blog/
Ask HN: How to get major bloggers write about my bootstrapped startup?
Hey guys, my startup http://visualwebsiteoptimizer.com/ (A/B testing tool) is just out of beta and we launched paid plans early this week. To announce that we have launched, I had mailed a personalized pitch to Mashable, RWW, TechCrunch, LifeHacker. But no one replied!

I know they must be getting 100s of pitches daily but I think our story is as good as other startups that they cover. We are bootstrapped, had 1200 beta users and now in the first week have actual paying users (with very close to being profitable). Users think our tool beats Google's tool by a huge margin (http://visualwebsiteoptimizer.com/testimonials.php) and it is actually very helpful to small businesses and marketers (in beta, we have user case studies where sales and conversions got increased by 20-90%). So, what's wrong with the pitch? Based on what I read, I even mailed link to this 2 minute short video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0YYNebfuvLc

I realize that getting covered on a major blog doesn't ensure startup success, but it is still a great way to announce to the world that you are open for business. So, what is the best way to get major bloggers write about my startup?

Are bloggers not writing about us because we are bootstrapped, based out of India and non-YC (or associated with a similar program)? Is there anything wrong with my approach?
I'm only the friend of an armchair economist, but wasn't supply-side economics deemed bullshit?

If there are users, the developers will come. Just because there are developers, doesn't guarantee users. This explains everything about Apple and Linux.
Or at least once you account for scholastic aptitude. If only there was a widely-used test that measured it...

But seriously, there must be some studies that explain what happens after two students with equal SAT scores graduate with degrees in different fields. Anyone know?
Google bid to sell Nexus One online a failure
No doubt, the way PHP deals with functions is one of the worst parts about the language. create_function and the rest have been made a bit better, though, with the introduction of anonymous functions in PHP 5.3.
Well, this is good timing! We have a brand new Django project coming out next week, and I'll have time to set it up with 1.2 from the start.
absolutely. if people paid market rates for education loans, you'd see an increased focus on rate of return. And we'd also see an increased focus from schools on quality instruction in well paid fields and less spending on recreational facilities.

For-profit schools may not be as well regarded, but remember that they have to pay taxes while the others don't. And many get a lot of other subsidies as well. So the real costs are somewhat obscured.
> If I hack together a web application in Scheme, instead of some Mathemagical, Dijkstra-approved language, does that make me an "artist"?

Dijkstra would not have liked this.
Er, surely you meant:

https://graph.facebook.com/search?q=%22slept%20with%22&t...
Your last paragraph has a lot of words but says very little. Can it not all be summed up as "talk to your customers?" Isn't this the foundation of any business? Does anyone actually advocate not doing so?

Obviously you need to be aware of the problems your customers face as a business.

But the notion that anything is the "most important" metric of progress reeks of classic silver-bulletism that plagues software engineering.

I also am not a big believer in "validation." You're never going to "validate" your ideas through customers. You're going to evolve your ideas through seeing people use what you build. But they're never "validated" or "proven right" through intimate customer feedback. Good ideas are "validated" over the course of years, often after much ridicule, resistance, and pain.
The Enemy Within (Conficker Worm)
If you look at his entire comment, he's asking questions. What I don't like is that Hacker News sometimes discourages people from asking questions, and promotes a culture of one-upmanship, of putting people in their place (or a 'slap on the wrist').

Perhaps it can't be avoided in an online forum. Perhaps it's the cost of any type of voting system that is trying to save everyone time. But it's a really good way to miss the big picture. Any revolutionary solution to any problem is going to sound wrong at first. It's just worth remembering that sometimes.

If you disagree with someone, it doesn't mean you have to downvote. This may seem like a bit of a stretch (this http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1350425 comment got me thinking about it), but there's a reason governments don't last as pure democracies. There's a reason they kill Socrates and make huge mistakes. The cognitive dissonance associated with 'mob rule' is a very terrifying thing. It's why we balance it with other branches of government, etc. Why we have constitutions, bills of rights that protect a minority's viewpoint from majority rule, in law, etc.

Hacker News, newsgroups, the internet...don't have that balance. So the responsibility is with everyone to be even more circumspect, to allow more breathing room, instead of simply reaching for the easy downmod.

Or maybe Hacker News isn't a 'classroom'. Maybe it's only for people who don't take much risk in their posts. I suppose there's some value in that. I admit though it seems less honest, interesting and helpful to me as a site for helping startups or people with a startup-like mentality.
Facebook: What's Changed and Why You Should Care
Note that this is the whole point -- if Facebook were free software, it would be that easy, because other software could interoperate with it effectively. Free software naturally ameliorates this kind of lock-in effect. Not using free software in the first place is what gets people into this mess.
Why are people who are not fans of Ruby not allowed to comment on how _why, arguably someone that made an impression in the programming world, has influenced their little corner of the world?

_why has done absolutely nothing for me either, I cannot stand Ruby, and its community, I don't understand why all the reverence for this single man. Yes, I know of _why's work, and yes seeing other people use his old nickname makes me feel sad since they won't ever really appreciate the ideas, and projects he put out into the world, but why are we still writing about him?

There are many other people that have contributed greatly to advancing of computer science as a whole that contributed to more than just one programming language that have changed the field of computer science as it was once known. Those people are the people we should be writing about, not someone who like a coward decided to up and quit.

_why reminds me of my younger brother, and even partly of myself back when I was a kid, if monopoly or some other board game was not going my way, the board would go flying and so would all the pieces, and it would no longer exists. _why removing all of his content, not passing it along to the next group of people, not even leaving a backup in place thereby causing others to scramble to find the latest up-to-date versions from local disks is very much like that game of monopoly where I am losing, and it is a cowards move.
That is a good article. A classic. A key part of it for me is:

---

Although America's universities are churning out a steady stream of brain-dead simpletons, our society relies almost exclusively on college credentials as the central determining factor of social status and employment opportunities.

---

I know it is a farce. But I also want the HR departments across the country to know that too. (I guess the lesson is: don't work for companies that consider college degree + GPA as the main determinant for your employment criteria).
The Open Enterprise Manifesto
Change the World, because it's boring not to.
Working with designers is an important and underrated thing for developers. I worked at a design firm for years and learned an awful lot.

It's a great selling point too. Many web projects suffer from, shall we say, a bit of friction between design and implementation. I sell myself to potential clients on my respect for, and ability to communicate with, designers.

Knowing a designer's vocabulary will make you better at what you do.
They didn't say what kind of cuts, and the "dagger" might be an awkward translation. Maybe they just meant he cut his wrists.

Unlikely, but not impossible.
That's a great idea: techroommates.com. I would seriously pay for that.
Also, the "make iPhones" note in HN submission title is a touch misleading considering Foxconn also makes pretty much everything else when it comes to electronics. I've stopped counting motherboard components I've seen with their logo on it.
A Taxonomy of Data Types
I'd already invested a lot of time in complaining. Who do I go above the store manager? How would I even figure that out? I sent an email to a generic Apple email address and got no response. What do I do next -- email Steve?

It's frustrating, but mainly saddening, as I'd never seen anything quite like that before. A friend of mine bought his iPhone from a New Hampshire AT&T store the following week and the difference was amazing. Since when does a cell phone store have a less pushy sales team?