skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Package management goes way beyond installing and uninstalling stuff. A good package manager, like apt or yum, will help your computer self-update (not only the core OS but every program you installed in your computer, through the same interface). It also shines where you don't want to know from where you download a given package - you just ask for the package manager to install it. The good package managers will also deal with dependencies and conflicts between packages, which is something that may not appear when you deal with applications but happens all the time with libraries.

You insist there is no need for package management because you never had real package management. The Macintosh method is very simple (much better than the Windows way) but it fails miserably when what you are installing is not an application.
The fact that this person can make both of these arguments simultaneously makes me chuckle:

I don’t have to spend even a millisecond wondering about how good their password security protocols are...

...

I don’t have to use some 3rd-party program or Firefox extension to generate and manage random password, only to be locked out when I have to access the site from a public terminal and my thumbdrive is in my other pants.

If I'm going to be typing passwords on a public terminal, the last thing I want to be using is OpenID. With OpenID, the keyboard sniffer running on that public terminal sends all of my logins to the Russian mafia, not just one.
We will be working on a client. The next thing is mac we hope, then we will be working on a client. Some people just like a client (myself included)
I don't trust Microsoft. ;-)
I think in extremes:

If you're a computer and software user, OSX is the way to go.

If you're a hacker, you can code in more than 10 programming languages, and you've been writing code for more than 10 years, then you'll be way better off with Ubuntu.

If you're somewhere in between, stick with OSX.

Forget about Windows for now. But don't be surprised if they come out with something truly wonderful some day.
This is very silly. It's a well-known concept in the business world that companies should stick with their core competencies. Ones that try to do too many disparate things at the same time generally fail. Facebook's core competency is not selling mortgages or credit cards.

Also, if mortgage brokers are only willing to pay some portion of 14 cents CPM there, that means Facebook is creating very little value for them. Which also means that if Facebook got into the mortgage selling business, they could probably capitalize off of it in much better ways than just advertising it on their relatively worthless site.

So in essence, the only industries Facebook would benefit from entering are ones that already pay them a high CPM. But if people were paying them a high CPM, they wouldn't be in this predicament.
Pierre... From what you say, it is glaringly obvious you never spent any time either with a Mac or with a modern Linux. True the monitors stuff is not mature, but multi-monitor machines are just now becoming more common. As for OSX being sluggish... What have you been using? a G3?

And I find that dropping to the command line is fairly common with me because I am a programmer. My son uses my computer from time to time and he has no idea there is such a thing as a command line. Maybe your sample is skewed by a number of programmers using Linux more than any limitation of the graphical environment.

I only agree with you about the Vista thing. It is the lousiest OS I have ever seen being pushed out the door. It's even worse than Windows Me.
But it's not really a higher CPM at all. There's no benefit to Facebook starting a mortgage brokerage and advertising that on Facebook (which apparently isn't a very valuable seller of advertising, or they'd already have decent CPMs) over just switching to a mortgage company entirely and advertising on other social networks. Or better yet, switch to selling mortgages and advertise on sites that are valuable to mortgage brokers.
Well, I have a Unix experience with more then 10 years and I can tell you that OS X (Darwin) is not less functional or harder to use then any other Unix system. I bet you haven't tried SunOS...
Great RoR Books?
So, I'm biting the bullet. After wondering about the hype of RoR, I've finally came up with a reason to design a site using said technology. The only problem is, when looking for a book to learn off of, there were too many choices!<p>Does anyone have any suggestions for great RoR books, or Ruby books in general?
Even if cans were worth a dollar apiece, six dollars would be worth much more than a 6-pack. Cash is considerably more liquid -- you can't walk into J.C. Penney and trade a few 6-packs for a pair of slacks.
I find it strange that this kind of change comes from the Homeland Security office.
Soros: "superbubble" that has been swelling for a quarter of a century is finally bursting
http://www.poynton.com/notes/reducing_eyestrain/index.html
OK, Here is a theme that works in Stylish. Maybe will add some more variants later.

http://userstyles.org/styles/6381
Haha. Two choice quotes about the language:

Malbolge was so difficult to understand when it arrived that it took two years for the first Malbolge program to appear. The program was not even written by a human being: it was generated by a beam search algorithm designed by Andrew Cooke and implemented in Lisp.

and

Malbolge's probably biggest piece of evilness comes from the encryption of instructions as they are executed. That encryption, fortunately, has a few weaknesses that make writing Malbolge programs feasible.
"Facebook" wouldn't have to change their core competencies at all. It would have a stake in a company who's core competency is whatever that industry happens to be.

The site is indeed relatively worthless, and I doubt anybody at all is paying them a high cpm in anything. Thats the whole point, to turn low cpm into somewhat higher cpm, in the long term by capturing more of the revenue stream.

Is it fool proof? No way. Facebook or whatever, could risk losing their investment in whatever company they bring up, and also lose the opportunity cost on whatever ads they could be selling instead of sending to their own child company instead... But does it stand a better chance at making more money in the long run compared to magical BS like social graphs and social ads? Yes, I definately think so.
Yes it was. But I should have been clearer for the type of literal argument starters that would tend to hang around here ;)

I wonder if google always honour robots.txt
how can we have an opinion if we don't experience looking at your monitor?
Actually, MacBooks only come with glossy displays, you have no choice over it. The MacBook Pros come with glossy or matte, you choose.
It's not so much for quick get-togethers, but large scale events that would otherwise be impossible or very difficult to coordinate.

Also, you can customize the frequency of different kinds of items on your news feed.
What would you do if you found 280 bucks in a stack of 20's on the sidewalk?

This actually happened to me on campus a couple years ago. Not knowing what to do, I picked up the bills and just stood there awkwardly, holding them out, hoping the person who dropped them would come back and claim them (under the assumption that a random person wouldn't say anything to me holding 14 20's). I skipped class waiting, and then, not wanting to miss the next class pocketed the money. Was I wrong?
Is the draft less grating?
You're assuming perfectly priced traffic, in an arbitrage-free environment where the buyers of traffic pay perfectly for the traffic, an exact amount proportional to their revenue that they will get from that traffic.

It doesn't always work that way in the real world. Some random company buying the ads at 10 cents CPM is not always getting traffic that is worth that much 100% of the time. By actually getting the entire revenue stream, the "child" company, and thus its parent would capture the true value of the traffic over a long period of time.
Programming Languages and their Celebrity Equivalents
The minute a startup starts making significant investments in mortgage brokers, credit card providers, etc., you're leaving their core competency.

I don't think you're understanding why this provides no value to anyone. You're turning Facebook into a Berkshire Hathaway of sorts, with the only coherency being that every company they buy a stake in advertises on Facebook. By that logic, why shouldn't Time Warner start buying stakes in whoever advertises on CNN? Why shouldn't everyone who sells ads do this?

Facebook gains no higher CPM from doing this either. I mean, they may make more money if these auxiliary businesses do well. But it's no more than if they kept selling ads on Facebook for 14 cents cpm, set up these side companies, and spent 14 cents cpm advertising them somewhere else. The fact that they own Facebook provides no value whatsoever for the side companies.

Effectively you're saying that any company with a non-functioning business model should just do something else too. That doesn't solve the problem.
This isn't really about the philosophical idea of free-will. The article describes how insects seem to spontaneously develop sophisticated movement patterns, instead of depending on preset rules.
Anyone know what this is?
No, I'm assuming that they could just buy ads with the same ROI in many places. For instance, if Facebook ads cost 20 cents cpm, but they earn 40 cents, then their ROI is 2x. I would assume they would have no trouble finding ads elsewhere with a 2x ROI. In fact, I'd be surprised if the market didn't function to make their ads be a 2x ROI at MySpace, Bebo, Hi5, and maybe Digg, Reddit, etc.

Spotting market inefficiencies like that should be really hard to do, considering that all of the mortgage brokers, for instance, already know their ROI on various sites, and the market will make it roughly equal everywhere over time.
I always took it for granted economists believed people's attitude had a significant influence on the market. In fact, this is probably why they say the opposite, so people don't go crazy. Similar to how telling people they don't have free will makes them more complacent.

Interesting how the feedback loop goes both ways so reality resembles what people say. An argument can seem self fulfilling.

However, this is not po-mo in the sense that reality is what people think it is, though, because people don't really lose their free will.
From what I understand, the matte screen is a glossy screen before it's coated with an anti-reflective material. Supposedly, some consumers saw "unfinished" displays at a computer show and liked them, and manufacturers noticed that customers were more apt to purchase shiny laptops. Given the difference in reflectivity between such displays in different laptops, I deduce that glossy screens do have some anti-reflective coating, just not as much as matte.
The Rails Way, by Obie Fernandez. Only RoR book you'll ever need. http://www.amazon.com/dp/0321445619/

This book is one of the three in plus's comment; another one his comment mentions is "Ruby for Rails", which will get you up to speed on Ruby as a language. It's a great book; get it too.
I understand what you're saying.

However, I'm trying to make this "whole is greater than the sum of its parts" argument. But, with Berkshire, almost all of its investments thrive well on their own. Buffett invests in each and every one because of fundamental reasons within each individual company.

My argument is that some companies are making a lot more money off of each traffic batch than the traffic batch is actually worth. By figuring out such companies, the value of the traffic to facebook would then be higher. Would this work with every company that advertises on FB? No. Could it might possibly maybe work with at least one or two companies? Yes.

Saying any company with a non-functioning business model should just do something else is really stretching it. I believe FB does have a functioning business model that could use a great deal of improvement. This, to me, could be such an improvement. What other alternatives are there? You have already said yourself that things like "social graphs" are just BS meant to inflate valuations to $15 billion.
How to sell books: attach vague, untestable doomsday claims to it.
It's just a story
Immigration and Naturalization Services would be the agency that used to take care these matters. They've since been rolled into with the Dept. of Homeland Security.
It's very productive and a lot of fun too. When you find someone who's a good wingman, things just click.

I can understand you're concern about getting matched poorly but the experience I had with pair programming is that there is a much greater chance you'll end up working well together and a much smaller chance than you might imagine that things don't work out.

In fact, you could say that pair programming is a great way to develop that rapport with a coworker. It's not just good for the company because the work is done better, I think it's good for you as a person, because people no matter how introverted are really wired to be social.

If someone were really just a toad and would be worse than useless as a partner, chances are that same kind of person won't want to do pair programming with you anyhow.
Top 10 bad excuses for staying in a bad job
Thanks for the recommendations, guys/girls.
It's testable in the long run. Considering he wants to be remembered as an intellectual, it'd be a bad move to purposefully make a big claim that's quite likely to be false.

As for selling books, the guy's one of the richest people in the world...
Your putting too much faith in the buyers of ads reacting to the changes in prices and knowing exactly how much the traffic they are buying is actually worth. All mortgage broker's/free i-pod scam/dating site/etc know the exact ROI they get back from each and every little bit of traffic? No way. In some industries, theres even a bunch of buyers, some less sophisticated than others, but are yet still able to buy the traffic at a certain rate because they are making a profit at that rate. That isn't optimization. In industries with fewer buyers (high traffic dating sites), one site might have to purchase traffic from a multitude of different sources, or indirectly purchasing it from their own affiliates who might purchase it themselves, to keep up their market share against other big competitors.

This isn't about spotting temporary market inefficiencies, its about spotting long term ones that lurk beneath the surface.
A plane?
I have used "real" package management, both on Linux and Mac OS X, and for native Mac OS X applications it's largely unnecessary. I rarely run into OS X apps that require I install a bunch of dependencies, and most OS X applications these days check for updates on their own. For those that don't there's AppFresh: http://metaquark.de/appfresh/

However, I do agree the method "fails miserably when what you are installing is not an application." MacPorts and Fink are decent solutions, though I admit they could be much better.
The direct income that he'll receive from this book won't even register as a tenth of a percent on his income statement. So clearly, he's not doing it for pure sensationalism. I actually think he believes what he's saying.
This is an interesting question. Why don't people share more of their standard contracts? I have a web consulting agreement. Is there a reason I can't just send that to you? Or publish it?
If you're just getting started with Rails, I'll recommend Beginning Rails by Jeffrey Hardy (who now works for 37s).

The only caveat is that it was written for Rails 1.2.3. The book's site is http://beginningrails.com/ and the author replies regularly to questions about the book (or Rails in general) over at http://groups.google.com/group/beginning-rails
Plus I don't think he can be faulted for thinking a recession was coming the first time he predicted it - maybe the signs were there that one was coming, but just didn't happen, or was delayed until now when it will finally hit harder.
Incidentally also a convenient counterexample against measuring productivity in LOC.
Abandoned/unmaintained open source apps
I'm trying to save some of my favorite open source apps that haven't been developed in a while. If you are interested in these and can grab the project go ahead. If you know something not on the list feel free to let me know (I'm sure there are hundreds) currently the list is 3. I only want apps that were developed to a point of being stable and useful.
Designing a Web site by the grid should be a rule, not a fad or trend
I loved reading some of his books like Alchemy of Finance, and Soros on Soros.

The ironic thing is he speaks a lot about reflexivity, where market's participants views on an outcome actually end up affecting that outcome itself.
"The Rails Way," is by far the best rails book I've seen. As you might gather from the title, this book really aims at teaching the ruby/rails idioms necessary to get the most out of rails.
How is this relevant to Hacker News ?
This is based on the fallacious premise that the limitations of the human brain are that it "doesn't store enough bits" or that those "bits" aren't getting stored permanently enough. In fact the human brain is a much denser information storage and processor than anything we've yet built. You don't think that, if it were actually useful for the brain, that nature could not have built a reliable information storage that rarely loses data throughout a person's lifetime and copies it faithfully? Look at DNA. That's a place where such a thing is useful. In a brain experiencing the ever-changing world, totally permanent storage is not useful, in fact it's counter-productive. I should know - I have eidetic memory and near-total recall, and I can barely function sometimes because I can't sort out what's relevant to a situation from details that are not relevant. The reason normal memory is fallible and discards a lot of detail is that that is important for thinking. Which by the way leads to another fallacy of ideas like the one in this article: data != information, and more data != better thinking

Even if such a device could be made - and it cannot; how would you connect it? There is not one "memory link" in the brain like some kind of freakin' USB port that you could reverse engineer a serial code for - even if it could be done, it would actually make things worse for you, not better.
It's inspiring to think that people can do more than they're expected to be able to do if they just don't know what that limit is.

A lot of people around here are trying to push themselves pretty hard, and appreciate the inspiration. (This one has popped up before, though.)
I had seen it a long while before, but it's interesting.
http://www.docstoc.com/search/web-consulting-agreement/

There are several to choose from.
I love reading old opinions and predictions.

"During my summer, I created Print Promotion, worked on a top secret project with Adaptive Path that will soon change the way you feel about blogging, and am now working with O’Reilly on an amazingly innovative project. Quite productive for 3 months."

I wonder what his "top secret" project was?
printf("%hx", *(unsigned short *)"YC");

...works on big endian machines. this works everywhere:

printf("%hx", htons(*(unsigned short *)"YC"));
Screw the books. All are out of date, except The Rails Way... but that's way too big for my taste.

Check out www.PeepCode.com. Best bang for $9 you can find. You'll probably find these most interesting to begin with:

* https://peepcode.com/products/rails-from-scratch-part-i

* https://peepcode.com/products/rails-from-scratch-part-ii

* https://peepcode.com/products/restful-rails

Another great resource is www.railscasts.com.
Combat Robot Attempts Rebellion Against Human Masters in Iraq, Army Pulls Plug for 10-20 Years
>> the terminal is retarded by default, Finder doesn't really do FTP properly (in 2008! WTF??)

What's wrong with Terminal.app? I find only 2 complaints for the Leopard version: the inability to change ANSI colors and in second, no support for 256-color rendering.

As for ftp, have you tried 'ftp' from the commandline? if you want a GUI, give cyberduck or transmit a try.

>> But hardware plays an important role too. MBP+OSX wins head down against an average disposable Dell/HP/Whatever, even Ubuntu powers can't help that junk, so Thinkpads rule.

Macbooks are manufactured by Asus and Foxconn, or at least the components. Granted though, they may require more quality components than Dell/HP/etc such as higher quality PCB, capacitors etc...
To the downmodders:

In terms of real money, what comes out of it, is affiliate sales for companies + brand advertising.

Brand advertising is mostly worthless and gets talked up in value because it is even more worthless on national television.

But the kind of advertising that results in a sale is worth real money. Facebook either needs to start selling mortgages in house or develop better relationships with someone who sells mortgages.
Ask YC: Karate club in SF bay area
I'm coming down for startup school and staying around for a couple of weeks. Anyone knows of a good karate dojo? My preference would be Shotokan, but I also don't mind any other styles, as long as its Karate.
This was pretty light and fluffy when it was written in 2005. How is this relevant now? His main example is how reddit is a failure. Say what you want about reddit (I don't like it), but it sold for money. Of the stuff that came out of 2005, it's the one everyone remembers (although I imagine Loopt will be a household name soon enough with the Verizon deal).

Seriously, where is my down arrow?
My recommendations: http://antoniocangiano.com/rails-books/
And there are a few titles coming out soon: http://antoniocangiano.com/2008/04/02/7-soon-to-be-released-...
It was at zero points when Arrington posted it.
Characteristics that make a difference, in no particular order:
a) Diagonal length & resolution
b) Sharpness
c) Brightness

I do not game much, if you do, response time may be a sticking point. I recommend reading up on TFT-LCD technologies:
http://www.tftcentral.co.uk/articles/panel_technologies.htm

This article may be of interest as well:
http://www.pureoverclock.com/article641.html

I own a 20" Viewsonic Vx2025wm hooked up to my desktop linux and sometimes windows machine and a 24" BenQ FP241VW running in tandem with my MacbookPro.

I recommend the BenQ monitor.
Build your own app in RoR http://www.sitepoint.com/books/rails1/

And the Poignant Guide
http://poignantguide.net/ruby/
Night Hacking (the productivity boost of 2 am)
This is a good example of how news.yc has changed over the last year. Or how continuously growing, unfragmented communities inevitably change over time.

The first time it was submitted last year, it went to Chapter 5 of the O'reilly book. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34193

This time it goes to an excerpt reposted on a blog.

Speaking of which, there are a lot of good things from the early days of news.yc that should be reposted. Do we have a repost policy?

I don't want to get banned for reposting things by adding an extra ? to the end.
Anyone want to debate Austrian economics?
The trouble with FriendFeed
This comment was pretty good, summing up the problem inherent with defining employment as 40 hours a week. http://reddit.com/info/6fjwo/comments/c03pct0

The troll is at the bottom of the main thread, he did pretty well by just comparing Austrian economics to Scientology and then saying inflammatory things.
Definitely black background.
RailsSpace: http://www.amazon.com/dp/0321480791
The direct income that he'll receive from this book

Two commenters now seem to think that Soros wants to sell books for money. No, he's going for his shot of glory--the guy who predicted the apocolypse. Trouble is, everyone's doing that lately...
Chipotle will be resigned to be a perennial runner-up to Qdoba until they get queso. Everybody knows that Qdoba is number one (except crazy people).
Another good motivational video