skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Personally, I think it's because many clients are used to years of hearing "programmer" and "web designer" as two separate jobs. If you're writing desktop apps, well, you're a programmer. If you're doing web-based stuff, you must be "just" a web designer.

And yes, you can easily do non-trivial stuff with a little light HTML and Javascript, but once you start getting into serious CSS, PHP, etc. it ceases to be something that anyone can pick up in an afternoon. In essence it becomes the same sort of professional work that "programmers" do.

But to the client there's still "programmers" and "web designers", with the prestige and the dollars definitely being associated (in their minds, anyway) with the former.
From the article:

1. Scale your database through database clustering

2. Scale your application, while leaving your existing database untouched by front-ending the database with In-Memory-Data-Grid (IMDG) or caching technologies. The database acts as a persistence store in the background. I refer to this approach as Persistence as a Service (PaaS).

Correct me if I am wrong but don't databases handle option 2 by themselves. In fact, isn't one of the primary purposes of a database that applications on top of them do not have to concern themselves with things like caching?

This reminds of another article where it pointed out two of the biggest mistakes with databases and one of them was the tendency to treat it like a dumb storage engine. This seems to be a classic case of that.
I take this as people not understanding what the heck they are putting out for bid. I wouldn't be surprised to find out that the last website they had was whipped together by some exec's kid.

If they thought that his prices were high for PSD to HTML/CSS, then they'd probably fall over dead if they wanted a quote for a back-end to go with it.
Huh, interesting graph. Great way to show both country and age cohort comparison.
I'll assume "To Schopenhauer, real arguments are actually fallacies, because mere humans have other goals than the truth" is an accurate summary of Schopenhauer's viewpoint. In that case, I _still_ have to say this is just a more thanaverage level of sophistication for a form of solipsism. But I cannot see it any other way than as solipsism.

That alone is reason enough to reject it. But here is another reason: his point about other goals is irrelevant. Why? Because though yes, we "mere humans" have other goals, at least _some_ of the time, those other goals require that we get to the truth of some matter. And those are precisely the fields of endeavor where rational argumentation still has some influence in our confused and irrational society.

That said, we _do_ have to take great care: the dishonest dissemblers who strive so hard to deceive us are _legion_, the honest reasoners who wish to persuade us of the truth by legitimate means are rare gems. But they have not disappeared completely yet.
Yet Whitehead says that even Aristotle's writings are mere "footnotes to Plato". So perhaps we should be spending more time with Plato's instead.
Just curious - has Norvig said that explicitly or (like Steele and Gabriel and Weinreb and others of that generation) has he just been pragmatic?
I didn't say anything about Torrentspy. Do you have any suggestions for what I can do in future discussions so that people listen more to what I actually say?

As for how common this type of downloading is, do you think if torrent sites didn't exist that even half of the downloads they facilitate would have been purchases instead? I don't think most downloaders have enough money to buy that much stuff.
I'm referring to Norvig's comments on Arc, which suggest more notation (albeit notation that remains isomorphic to sexps).
Ah, another example of how A"ad hominem" is misused;) Please see my other reply listing three different sites using three different definitions of "ad hominem". None of those definitions support your example. Rather, saying it is so because "he's a distinguised prof" is an appeal to authority, which is not _always_ a fallacy.
11-year-old takes school network by the horns
Mobile Web Trends & Products
Where/when did Norvig comment on Arc?
Respectfully, you might start by remembering what you originally said, considering the plain meaning of your words, and the context in which you say them. In this case, you begun this thread by referring to the "vast amount of good" that "sites like" Torrentspy do.

Your other argument seems to be that we shouldn't concern ourselves with the costs inflicted by torrent sites, because they are small --- "not even half of the downloads" directly rob producers of revenue. I don't care to chase that argument down. If you believe your argument is persuasive, I have good news for you: you needn't bother paying your taxes, either. The marginal cost to the government of losing Bruce Lewis' tax revenue is very nearly zero. In fact, if everyone like you stopped paying taxes, we'd be no worse off. Under your argument's rubric, I can see no reason for us to trouble ourselves with the task of collecting taxes from Scheme web developers at all.
The downloads which hurt someone, and the ones which don't, can be separated.
You ask, "why would you put extra layers on it, which will have to be unwrapped to get to the inner logic?".

There are two possible reasons:

1) you know your audience is not that logical to begin with, and need to be lured by illogical appeals to emotions etc.

2) you know they could be persuaded by logical argument, but need help summoning up the will to persist in following it. In that case, you mix logic with entertainment and exhortation. But you must mix carefully, to keep from falling into the trap of merely luring by illogical appeals (or even seeming to do this). Unfortunately, few have the patience for this, so many take the easy way, (merely luring).

Plato took course 2) often in his dialogs. Augustine did the same in both sermons and treatises. Aristotle never did, at least not in his surviving works (his dialogs are lost).
I have to admit I'm not an EE by any stretch of the imagination, but if you look at the definition of amperage (the amount of current that flows past a given point in one second), I think it's most analogous to a water current.
The Nizkor list _is_ pretty good, but some of their definitions, and even examples used to discuss them, are not very convincing. Please see the separate reply where I gave three other lists of definitions.

Actually, one of my long time favorite such sites is:

http://www.fallacyfiles.org/index.html.
http://www.archub.org/arcsug.txt
An individual user can think about what he would have bought without torrents, or not, and only download things he would not have bought anyway.
How do they do that without contributing to other infringements by people who would pay?
Contributing how? You can turn off seeding.
Re #3: you're right to distinguish between the MS environments for C++ and C#. Your comment on VC++ matches my experience from about the same time. But when I say that VS.NET is backward and provincial, believe me I mean it as an understatement. There are very clear points of comparison (Eclipse and IntelliJ) and compared to either of them VS is a bad joke. It only survives because the MS development world is largely a parochial backwater in which most programmers eat the porridge they're given and don't care to look at anything else, like medieval peasants who never leave their village.

Apologies for ranting. I've never been a big MS-hater (though I seem to be getting there), and I hardly think the Java IDE is the last word in programming environments (having an editor generate my duplicate code for me is not my idea of a good time; as you may have noticed, I like Lisp!) But like most hackers here, I care deeply about my tools, and it pains me to work in ways that feel suboptimal or ugly.

Your other points were, as usual, pretty interesting, but I burned myself out on this one. :)
The OLPC is designed this way; the motherboard is behind the screen.
I tried the poll feature a few days ago, it wouldn't submit no matter what I tried.
I think the problem is the professors and pundits who don't realise that the entire cathedral of human knowledge is built on a foundation of permanent, ruthless copying.

That "intellectual property" does not suffer from the laws of scarcity is one of the great gifts of the universe to Man.
Nice essay, only scratching the surface but catching some important content in the process.

Similar approach with more detail in 'The Future of Management' by Gary Hamel (ISBN-13: 978-1-4221-0250-3), at Amazon

http://www.amazon.com/Future-Management-Gary-Hamel/dp/142210...
I wouldn't read too much into this. When a client tells you that you cost too much, it's not a statement of fact. It may not even be something they really believe. They may just be probing you to see if you will lower your rate.

On the (published) advice of Tim Ferriss, I read Roger Dawson's Secrets of Power Negotiating. It's a highly enlightening view into the mind of a relentless game-player. One of Dawson's first recommendations is: When you are negotiating with someone and they name a price, always flinch. If you're physically present, you should literally flinch, at least slightly. If you're on the phone, you execute a verbal flinch. If you're in email... you could try saying something like "My god, that's a programmer rate. I thought I was hiring at designer rates." (If the price you're objecting to is a ridiculously reasonable rate for a designer, you could always say "Oh, gosh. The high school sophomore charged a lot less.")

And then you stop, and wait. In the best-case scenario, your opponent will immediately say "oh, I didn't realize you were used to paying so much less; I'll lower my rate". In the second-best scenario, your opponent will fret, wonder what you were talking about -- perhaps even writing a blog post about it -- and then lower their rates, or make other concessions (Perhaps they won't raise their rates in six months, the way they usually do? Perhaps they will agree to push up the delivery date?). This will happen because you will have subtly but effectively said "I think your rates are awfully high, relative to the competition; you had better deliver".

It's just gamesmanship. If you really want to know whether or not programmers and designers can make comparable salaries, you need to get actual data: Poll your colleagues, or try to hire some designers yourself and see what they quote you. Or just wait and see if you ever get a job at your posted rates.
It seems strange to me that anyone should care about having their honor code plagiarized (and in this case I'm not sure that the author(s) do care). If the point of an honor code is to get people to act better, shouldn't you be happy that your honor meme is spreading, even if you don't get credit for it?

In fact, to me, insisting on being credited seems to go against the spirit of creating an honor code.
Looks like Russia, the U.S., Germany, Switzerland, Brazil and possibly Argentina are the only countries where the youngest generation (25-34) is not the most educated. The U.S.'s education rates have apparently been close to flat for the past couple of generations. Russia's crazy history shows. Germany is in surprisingly bad shape, mostly flat but with the youngest generation at the bottom. Switzerland, Brazil and Argentina resemble Russia; this may mean that in those countries it's more common to get a college degree later in life (or else fewer young people are getting a degree at all).
I don't see much there to suggest Norvig is a big fan of adding syntax to Lisp. In fact you could read "This seemed to satisfy the infix advocates" as an expression of the opposite viewpoint.
That's not his main complaint at all. His complaint is that C#/.NET inhibits him from building abstractions natural to his problem. He gives three good examples of this, obviously drawn from real experience working on real problems. He also gives good examples of the kind of workarounds one is forced into when blocked by a language or library from growing one's own program in a sensible way.

I'll add that, in my experience, most claims about programming that talk about "enforcing" are rooted in theories or processes about programming that bear little relation to what hackers actually do.
"It's surprisingly restrained" -- It is a long essay, so most people that would write childish comments might not bother to read it at all, still there a are few burried comments that are pretty inane.
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Works much better than the Yahoo! Shortcuts Wordpress plugin, I did a quick review http://knightknetwork.com/2008/03/28/goodbye-yahoo-shortcuts-hello-zemanta/#comments
I agree on that, but also sometimes I find myself much more productive when I work from home. There is a lot less distraction, no interruptions, quiter, can play my favorite music in the background, -- very important things to productivity when you are coding.

But I also find that when I am in office, I can do things faster, if it is something when there are other people involved. I can go to their desk and discuss about how to resolve a particular issue, maybe even draw things on a whiteboard. It helps a lot.

So, Ideally I would like to come to work only 2-3 days a week, and work from home the rest. But unfortunately my manager would probably feel uneasy about it, as he is not a former engineer, so he just wont understand. So giving him these arguments wont be enough. There have to be some direct and measurable economic benefits for a company to allow telecomuting en masse.
This is actually one of my imaginary gadgets in high school. There's also laptops with vertically rollable fabric screens.
You ignored the other ways in which one illicit downloader contributes to other downloaders, and ignored the original point, which is that torrent sites like Torrentspy do not obviously do "vast amounts of good", as you originally claimed. Do you feel like your arguments are convincing?
>that torrent sites like Torrentspy do not obviously do "vast amounts of good"

Sure they do. They spread information for free, which is vastly good for the people that get it for free.
Which way could a careful user not avoid contributing to that kind of climate?

The "vast" good is the over 50% of downloads (my estimate) that wouldn't have been purchases anyway. Even if it's 5%, that's still a lot of value of movies/etc that people get that is good.
we were at startup school last year
> The language is not suitable for web development, or for GUI development

WTF? Are you aware of the ridiculous number of examples in both?
I wonder if the scale doesn't go high enough. It's hard to say because it's not clear what the goal of "disagreeing" is. If it's to convince the other person of your own perspective, then I humbly submit that none of these is likely to get you there.

What about the dialectic? What about appealing to common values or goals, and drawing connections between these common values or goals and your own argument? Maybe these approaches are too large in scope to be contained -- or, for that matter, likely to succeed -- within a single comment or comment thread, but I believe it's "higher" on the scale and, when practiced well, more likely to pursuade others than simply demolishing their arguments or employing the other tactics on down the list.

Or perhaps I've missed the goal of the essay?
i find this one : http://www.dartmouth.edu/~matc/MathDrama/reading/Hamming.htm... to be quite nice too.
All freeloading is vastly good for the freeloaders, Kevin. Do we need to go through the pointless excercise of demonstrating all the instances of freeloading that you aren't comfortable with?
How is it "good" for people to get things they place a value of zero dollars on? How does that "good" outweigh the damage they do by disincentivizing content creation? If infinitessimally small costs are OK in the case of torrents, as you say they are, why vaccinate your children? That, too, imposes a tiny cost on everyone else. Why pay your taxes? Why not send spam? Your spam messages impose a tiny cost on everyone, compared to the major spam factories.
Yeah I've been doing some freelance work remotely for the last 7 months while being a student full time, and I find myself wasting a lot of time just talking of messenger with other people who're like me. Communicating over the internet takes up half of my work time(or close to that), what a waste!
> They may just be probing you to see if you will lower your rate.

That could be out of genuine ignorance. A friend referred potential clients who had purchased "a set of integrated scripts" for 200 pounds (approximately US$390) and "just" want them uploaded and configured. I looked at the scripts, recognised some of them from Matt's Script Archive and quoted 20 hours work at 20 pounds per hour. They said no. Eventually, they went elsewhere and paid an extra 50%. I suspect that they were too embarassed to admit that my quote was reasonable.
Note: College degree does not mean university degree. For US, university degree rate is like 28-33%. Canada's is lower then that.
The entire point of copyright is to prevent freeloading; see Posner. Without protection, a rational market bids the price of content down to its marginal cost, which is zero. In a market that prices content at zero, no content is created. Freeloaders hurt everyone.

The GPL case and the movie case are identical. The same argument can be made for both that a single marginal case of infringement imposes negligable costs.
Reasonable people could disagree, unless/until Norvig clarifies, but I'm going to take his apparent conversion to Python as evidence that Norvig is not a sexpr fanatic.
It's not a value of zero dollars. People don't buy (or rent) things when the price is higher than the value to them. If the price is $10, and the value to them is $3, they wouldn't buy it.
As things stood, #4 would have required #1 or #2 for starters.
What would the difference be? I go to a university, but am getting a degree from a college within the university. I would think that means I'll have a college/university degree - I don't see how you can get one without the other.
Your argument is incoherent. It observes that, at $70,000, a BMW M5 is priced too high for me to buy it. So, I should simply take it, blaming BMW for mispricing it.
If you take a BMW, now the car dealership has one less BMW. That's harm done.

If you download a movie, no one has one less movie afterwards.

It's like using a Star Trek replicator on a BMW, not stealing one.
For me, as long as the girl is intellectually curious, the actual specific books she likes doesn't seem to matter.
I don't think down arrows would be enough. Unfortunately a lot of new Ask YC posts are opinionated and people vote as means of identifying with the post rather than as a measure of interest or quality. Its interesting how well the poll system reverted the up arrow to a quality measure rather than an agreement measure in polls.

Most of the objectionable AskYC posts could probably be shoe-horned into polls by editors - just with 'agree' or 'disagree' options.

Maybe every post could have additional [agree] [disagree] buttons, because a lot of poor quality submissions are equally opinionated.
I believe most honor codes have the prevention of cheating and plagiarism as their prime function -- which is why this is the perfect example of irony for your high school freshmen.

That said, you're addressing broader issues of intellectual property which certainly merit discussion. Giving credit, to me, is essential when basing work on a previous source.
Ask YC: MBP or Thinkpad
[Note: I've been reading here for a while but I haven't posted before, so I apologize for making my first post a self-centered request...]

I'm currently laptop shopping, and can either pick up Thinkpad T61 or a Macbook Pro (pre-Penryn refurb) for roughly the same price. I've always liked the Thinkpad keyboard and sturdiness, but a lot of people I respect seem to be migrating to Macs. It would be nice to buy a computer and not have to install a new OS right away, but I worry that I'll break the MBP.

I'm a college student and greenhorn programmer, so I'd love to hear your advice or experience.
You're asking the wrong question. Why do modern computers burn so much energy? 12 years ago, I was using an Amiga600 which came with a 15 Watt power supply. Nowadays, try finding a laptop that has a power supply less than 100 Watts. Furthermore, you can buy gamer tower cases which come with 1000 Watt power supplies. WTF?
Suffering from "make install"
What will you use it for? Are you going to use it for development?

To me, the choice is simple: MBP runs OS X, other laptop doesn't. Since my whole toolchain depends on unix tools and TextMate, I really don't look at it as having a choice.
Probably he means American associate/two year degrees. It gets even more confusing outside of the US, where "college" often means academic high school and university is the equivalent of 4 year American college.
Corporate Greed: Creative Presents Cease-and-Desist Note to Developer Hero
u r a fag!!!!!!
C++ is a pita and it's no surprise that it's actually the highest compensated language to work in, at least here:

http://www.indeed.com/salary?q1=lisp&l1=&q2=c%2B%2B&...

I suppose the reason is that it can only realistically justify its existence at the bleeding edge (eg, with graphic engines, drivers, etc) where the work is inherently difficult as well.
I think the client is simply trying to negotiate with the author. He felt like his feelings were hurt; however, he should educate his customers.

If somebody replies, that means they are interested. And, they only said it was a bit too much, not outrageously insane. Nor did they say they aren't prepared to pay it. They're simply asking for reassurance from the guy that he is a programmer.

The way to act on this is to respond nicely and educate the customer. In this case, you would explain that you are the same great developer who created the web site, but that you agree with them, and therefore included in the hourly fee the additional work of consulting with a great programming resource without charging them extra, because you like to meet their needs exactly the way a great client like them deserves. Additionally, it should be easy for a web developer to show the client examples of what you've done before that's exactly what the client is looking for: a site based on graphics you designed, and the results of one of those web site validity tools that shows your CSS/XML code is as good as it looks. (And then if the client likes what you coded, and you never end up having to subcontract a programmer, don't gloat and tell them this.)

The author should put himself in his clients' shoes.
I've had four laptops: two Mac Powerbooks, one iBook, one IBM Thinkpad T43. The T43 was definitely the worst. With the T43, recovering from suspend was the most dicey and the build quality was junk. I hear the quality has declined since the division became Lenovo.
http://ccmixter.org/ maybe http://www.podsafeaudio.com/
I'm not doing it as a form of disagreement. (I don't expect MetaFilter readers to see this thread.) I'm just explaining where that part of the essay came from.
In Canada, a college degree (generally referred to as a "diploma") is a two year course, usually in an applied area such as graphic design or radio broadcasting. A university degree is a four year course in an academic area like philosophy or chemistry.
Why upgrade to Wordpress 2.5 (5 min version)
I have a MBP [pre penryn, btw, amazon sells it now for $1520 after rebate, which is what I bought, not refurbished].

I also have a Thinkpad T42. I use the ThinkPad for 'work' and MBP for personal coding.

I prefer the MBP for almost every aspect. It is not flawless, like the mouse acceleration with external mouse SUCKS and it does not play well in a docked situation [has its quirks].

My T42 has had 4 HD crashes in 2 years, a fan death. The Thinkpad feels very flimsy. MBP is built rock solid.

Finally having OS X [I do RoR on the MBP on *nix platforms] pretty much settles it. I used to run Ubuntu on the T42, but somehow the MBP feels complete for coding.