skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I can understand why they do it that way. But over time, I fear, people will busy themselves more with managing contacts and promoting themselves than with any deep technology work.

I mean you can see it today if you read blog comments. There is a growing share of people spending their day making flattering pseudo insightful comments on other people's blogs.

And using open source projects for self promotion is very damaging for those projects. The difficulty for many open source projects is that they need maintainers over many years even when the technology isn't the hype of the day any longer. Having self-promoters pass through a project until they got the job they want is a horrible idea.

Also, I'm not sure that it's a smart move on the part of cloudera to actively ask people to hit on their employees. Is that really the best use of their time?
Another Interview with Jason Fried of 37signals [video]
I think it was more about Solaris support than just the mere fact of having another build server.

Sun Microsystems - and for a short time its new owner Oracle - had provided three member servers to ensure PostgreSQL was stable on the Solaris operating system.
Will Microsoft CEO, Steve Ballmer, Be Fired for Low Stock Price?
Back everything up. Now.
Or, if you prefer, you can see the breakdown of interview topics and sections here:

http://bigthink.com/jasonfried
So in regard to The scope of this piece is narrower than that. This post really focuses on their take on pricing and the analogies they often use with their own experiences, which I feel aren’t applicable for the reasons given. Sometimes this advice is pushed harder than it should be, with little awareness of the lack of relevance it has to many start-ups., I wonder how you would evaluate Reddit's model, as it is apparently not a taker of the advice that you disagree with?
Occasionally try restoring your backups and check that the really important stuff is still in a usable form.
If the coefficients of a polynomial add to zero, then (x-1) is a factor.

For example, let's try and factorise f(x) = 2x^3 + 9x^2 + 4x - 15

What happens if we set x = 1? Then f(1) = 2 + 9 + 4 - 15 = 0, so (x-1) must be a factor.

It's much easier to get f(x) = (x - 1)(2x^2 + 11x + 15) = (x - 1)(x + 3)(2x + 5) if you know one of the factors in advance. This was useful at school, at least. Not so much now.

* See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polynomial_remainder_theorem
Heh, I moved to Poland last year and was surprised at how it's not only the computer experts who pass around pirated stuff - basically if you have a computer, you'll have pirated stuff on it. You've given me a good explanation for why it's so widespread :)
Amen! You only know how painful this is if you've something very important. Not-backing-up cost me, shoot I don't know, at least $4,000 once, and probably more than that.

Also, answer this question: If your home burns down, will your backup still work? I like to have one or two hard copies, and one cloud copy of the most important things.
Mentally accept that bugs with your code are your fault. You'll end up fixing them faster.
Sometimes we get stuck, writer's block kicks in. Do yourself a favor, get up and go do something else. The magic elves will come and fix whatever you were stuck on, I promise.
Open Source Your Career
A productivity gem from Jerry Seinfeld, heavily paraphrased.

For anything you wish you were doing every day, like working out or practicing violin or working on your startup: Get a big, yearlong calendar and put it on a wall in your bedroom. Every day you complete your task, mark a big, red "X". Eventually, you'll build up a big string of X's and won't want to break it. That incentive will push you more than you think.
Use zsh.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zsh
The argument made at the start (I did not make it beyond this) is terrible.

I like complex games.
Complex games currently require copyright to be funded.
Therefore copyright is a necessity and breaking it is a crime akin to spoiling the environment.

I'm not saying I disagree that copyright is a way society can provide an incentive for complex information based goods.

But this issue is vastly more complex than he's making out.

How long does copyright need to exit for to provide the best balance between incentive to the producers and the public good of old out of copyright media.

Does society really benefit from things like starcraft II or would we all be just as happy with less complex information based products.

What would we get for entertainment if we didn't have copyright? Given the complexity of some free Mods out there I'm going to go ahead and guess it's abit different to the shadowy wasteland of flash games he suggests.
I find the article to offer no insight. I surmise that it was written in a trollish manner to garner attention.
Looking at previous post by the Author, this is the first to extend over 5 lines.

Also, the Author tries to appeal to his authority[Oxford, Economics] which I consider poor taste; your logic should be able to stand on its own merits.

I myself was going to write an article on the failings of 37signals philosophy. But, talk is cheap; they have spent many years developing their philosophy; a simple cognitive dismantling of their philosophy would not suffice.

Any counter-arguments must be made in a similar fashion as they made their philosophy, in the real world with tangible results.
Here is another good read on vi/vim.

http://www.viemu.com/a-why-vi-vim.html

See "misconception #4" for this particular point.
Mutexes and Condition Variables using Futexes
The problem is that the money would be spewing out of ATMs in hotels and corner shops across the US and you wouldn't be there to collect.
Android 3.0 "Gingerbread" detailed
Raising Capital and Business Building options
On Naming Startups & Products
Reality is not an acceptable reality. I have been waiting for four month and nobody complain about reality, is time to proclaim it and discuss why reality is not an acceptable reality, but before starting, let tell us about your desired heaven. Well, I'm glad Steve is posting again, more stuff for happily procrastinating. By the way, I'm reading a book about Joomla!, php people don't have macros but they have something that works perfectly to make a huge infrastructure for web programming, so being easy to program and deploy is the best macro for the humble web programmer.
I wonder if Steve has updated his views on this since he wrote this (2006) in light of the emergence of clojure.
That reply is the non-subtle way to call someone stupid.
When I started to learn Lisp, the "Which Lisp?" problem was the first thing to hit me. Same with Scheme. I eventually went with CLISP and PLT (Racket).

Issues like hygiene didn't really bother me too much. As long as you are aware of it its not an issue.

While I really like the power of Lisp/Scheme (especially macros), I find that for most programming task Python or Ruby are good enough. There was an interesting post along similar lines 'Why Ruby is an acceptable Lisp'[1].

One thing I am really interested is in seeing how Perl 6 works out. It supports Lisp style macros (by making the parser available to the programmer) while using conventional syntax. While I am a Python fanboy myself I would seriously consider Perl 6 once there is a CPython grade implementation available.

[1] http://www.randomhacks.net/articles/2005/12/03/why-ruby-is-a...
WILS: Load Balancing and Ephemeral Port Exhaustion
Critical log review checklist for security incidents
there's at least one show-stopping bug lurking somewhere in your code.
Get into testing.
jfdi.

or its cousin:

maybe, but do it anyway.
Google To Take On Facebook?
Some people, when confronted with a problem, think
“I know, I'll use regular expressions.” Now they have two problems, fortunately, one solves the other.
UN declares clean water a 'fundamental human right'
Styles in Silverlight: Inheritance, Precedence & Other Advanced Topics
The point is to map some easily-typed, but rarely-used, key combination as your escape key. I use jj. On the rare occasions I have to actually type jj, I just wait about a half second after typing the first j, and then the second j is received as a separate keystroke, and not interpreted as the second part of a mapping.

And the only times I remember having to actually type jj are when I'm having the Vim keymapping conversation with somebody who asks "So how do you type 'jj'?
'i' and 'a' (mnemonic: the 'a' grabs all of something (and its white space) as opposed to 'i' which grabs the inner part) as modifiers for 'c', 'd', 'y', and 'v' can be very useful, but I don't see them talked about much in most tutorials.

See :help motion.txt - they're in section 6. Text Object Selection. Also, just play around with them a little. For example:

<p>This is a tes|t. Do not be alarmed.</p>

If that's your text, and the cursor is at the pipe:

ciw # remove all of 'test', enter insert mode
caw # remove the word 'test' and preceding space, enter insert mode
vit # visually select all the text within the <p> tags
vat # visually select the whole <p> element
My prediction: someone will get tired of waiting, and they'll Torvalds Arc into obsolescence before it's ever released

It certainly looks like Arc has been "Rich Hickeyed" judging by the recent announcement of funding for Clojure. Think about that for a moment - a commercial organization is actually funding development of a new lisp!
Google Code Blog: New Google Font Previewer - Webfonts Easier and More Fun
Never forget that success if always a collective effort, so invest your time and energy in relationships with others.
Calculate the Size of a Folder/Directory using .NET 4.0
No, but the author does make the mistake that you can apply b2b pricing knowledge to b2c situations.
> ‘People are willing to pay’ say 37 signals to the cowering mass of young developers bombarded with an implicit open source manifesto written across the social web.

It's not "open source" vs. "selling software." 37signals heads one of the most popular open source projects of all time. They also sell their software. It's "free services" vs. "selling software."

Of course someone who is set on never charging for a product as a business model will not find 37signals' advice helpful.
At the risk of predicting future fashion trends, which is rarely a good idea, I'll venture that objects are going to continue to be trendy for at least a few more decades.

This article is four years old, but since the prediction spans decades, I think it's fair to pick on it a little.

The OOP trend seems to be waning. The languages people are getting excited about lately seem to be de-emphasizing OOP and providing other mechanisms for some of the useful attributes of OOP.

Haskell and Clojure don't have OOP as most people know them, but Clojure's multimethods and Haskell's typeclasses replace OO polymorphism to a large degree. Scala and F# have OOP, but using it is optional.

Ten years ago, a new language intended for practical work and lacking OO wouldn't be taken seriously. That has changed, and the change seems to be accelerating.
To be a kind, you only need one crown. That is in in real life the magic moments are created from routine days and they shine because they are the exception, never the rule. So don't coin many gems or you will end up seeing them as simple rocks.
A deal, particularly an investment, isn't done until the money is in your bank account.
> Not many journalists if any are prosecuted from their own state for reporting what the power that be does not want to hear.

I don't quite get where are you coming from with this. A good deal, maybe half of the political prisoners and political assassination victims worldwide are journalists. Hell, in my homeland at least one journalist mysteriously disappeared and a few went through the prison.
Somewhat related, any advice on whether I should get an HTC Incredible, or a Droid X? (or something else?)
Read the spec before programming.

(This might seem obvious, but I find that it is tempting to "just see if I can get it to work" before I read the documentation. I always end up with worse code than when I take the time to read up on the technology. A similar advice is The Pragmatic Programmer's "Don't program by coincidence")
You only need one. You only need one business venture to work right to be considered successful.
How to Set Up a Moleskine Notebook for Maximum Productivity
See how to set up a small notebook as a portable tool for gathering information and keeping organized.
Mine : Remember a pay cheque goes a long way in alleviating the horrors of a corporate job. Not everyone can afford to be a struggling hacker waiting for the big pay-off.
Me too. I also tend to zip to the beginning of the line a lot, out of habit. Trying to save in notepad or a windows editor can do really bad things: C-a C-x C-s. Ouch.
That's a good point. I meant in the western democratic world like US, UK etc.
Nokia's problem is that the smartphones lack coherent overall design. They are just a bunch of random features glued together.

What is needed is not a "Steve Jobs" but a guy who can design a smartphone with a good, overall usability experience. And get rid of unneeded features to keep it simple.

It must be one guy with a clear vision, not a bunch of committees and engineer groups trying to make democratic decisions, with the added bonus of financial ppl crippling the product by reducing RAM and CPU etc.
Russian scientists have created a breed of domesticated foxes (costs $6K)
I think you're confusing MSR with MS corporate. The corporate culture at MS seems to be very different from the MSR culture, and it's the corporate culture that people pick on.

Comparing MSR with Google doesn't make sense because MSR is very independent from MS corporate, culture wise at least.
For a constant growth rate of r%, the formula for the doubling time Td is given by log(2)/log(1 + r/100) which can be simplified to approximatly 70/r.

* See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_72 for more info and background/variations that improve on accuracy in certain situations.
Not sure if it is a 'gem' but it certainly is useful:

tail -10000 somelogfile | cut -d ' ' -f 1 | sort | uniq -c | sort -n | tail

Quick one liner to get a fix on who is currently messing with your server in ways that are 'counter-productive', also a nice way to show newcomers to unix how you can string together existing unix commands to create new ones on the fly.

As for start-up advice that would fit in one line:

A practical, bug ridden, bad implementation of something trumps a theoretical, perfect implementation of the same thing.
> However, what are you doing in Insert mode

Writing things?
Indeed, that is the elephant in the corner of the room. One might almost say the typical consumer doesn't understand the difference between free and in speech and as in beer...
I recommend reading the book http://www.amazon.com/Courage-Create-Rollo-May/dp/0393311066

He offers the thesis that creating something new is likely to be fraught with anxiety. Understanding that this is the case may in fact decrease this anxiety. One of the symptoms of this anxiety is an avoidance.

So perhaps think of it this way: as you sit down to do something new, and feel the distraction, this can mean you are getting into the creative mode.
Unless this resolution also creates an obligation for someone to pay for it, it's just words.

How about booting countries out of the UN who spend billions on submarines, aircraft carriers, nuclear weapons and a space programme while their people lack basic essentials? I'm looking at you, India.
I can never understand some elements of the Linux community to speak ill of other community members success.

Ubuntu is probably the best thing thats ever happened to the Linux desktop - its being installed by manufacturers the world over and thats years of contributions that are actually being used by people.

I'm at a bit of a loss to what Greg feels Canonical should do about this. Stop offering Ubuntu? Have Mark post a warm and fuzzy blog post? High-five Redhat engineers every time their code works?

Canonical have done a monumental service to the open source community via their Launchpad service. They provide space for documentation, VCS hosting, issue tracking, repository hosting and build services. They enable communities.

I'd also like to make a special mention to the thousands of hours Canonical engineers and Ubuntu community members spend pulling patches from "downstream" (other distributions including Ubuntu) and pushing them upstream (the kernel, GNOME, KDE, Xorg, etc) - this sort of behaviour fosters better software for the whole community - not just Ubuntu.
Just to give an example: MSR is developing a Haskell compiler, and they run Linux on some of their boxes.
The other problem is that people that watch shows online might not even consider watching the same show on television even if they're avid TV viewers. For example people who flock to "OMG this pilot is hilarious!!!" links on social media when bored probably aren't going to watch the series during prime time
I found the part about yubikey to be the most interesting. I was not previously aware of it. What a fantastic alternative to the standard RSA LCD display key. The implementation as a keyboard is pure genius.
House Panel Votes To Approve Bill Legalizing Online Gambling
And before everyone gets too excited, it's been created as a web-app already a few times!
How do ad exchanges and real-time bidding platforms work?
Locksmith in
911 locksmith services.com provides technicians who are highly trained professionals and offer a 24-hour reliable service 7 days a week.
A similar idea occurred to me with movies - a rejected scripts repository for unmade films would be interesting for the fanatics and occasionally might uncover a gem.
You might end up with a lot of garbage though.
The problem with Debian in the past (and I say this as someone who formerly maintained some packages and is a Big Fan) was that the release schedule was unpredictable. I don't know what that's like these days - anyone care to comment?
I picked this one up on Hacker News.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1398805
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ego_depletion

The title says it all. Self-control is exhaustible. So when you're trying to make changes in your life, keep it to one simple thing at a time. Over time the one thing you decided to change stops being self-control and starts becoming a habit. Once it becomes a habit? Start training something else. You'll rack up positive changes in no time.
There is more than just this case to suggest this. There were other Feral children who developed to a similar level to Genie (though, as pointed out by another commenter, it's impossible to say how much of their lack of development is a result of the abuse itself and has nothing to do with language). There is the Pirahã who don't have numbers as part of their language and are apparently unable to learn them passed a certain age (note: AFAIK both these points are contested). Another part of the idea comes from the observation that our brains stop forming new connections at some point.

But I think all of this is touched on in the article. I was in the "language first" camp until I read this. Fantastic stuff.
I agree that their past editorialism hurts their credibility. As you say, it really undercuts the "big dumb pipe" argument as a defense whenever there is collateral damage from leaked information.

I really hope Julian Assange can figure out how to navigate the many minefields involved in a site like wikileaks.
Cancel doesn't give them APPLICATION NOW, so it's just training them to reflex-click allow. It's a pavlovian reaction: Cancel -> no application; Allow -> application. If they launched the application, they probably want to see what's in it.
They're trying to avoid what Paul Graham said:

"It's very dangerous to let anyone fly under you. If you have the cheapest, easiest product, you'll own the low end. And if you don't, you're in the crosshairs of whoever does."

http://www.paulgraham.com/start.html
>Of course, a controlled study of this would be unethical,

We can't do as the Pharaoh did for testing purposes, of course, but if the estimates are right about how many people make it at least to late adolescence without language I think there are probably enough cases out there to learn a great deal.
from the same post:

"In technology, the low end always eats the high end. It's easier to make an inexpensive product more powerful than to make a powerful product cheaper. So the products that start as cheap, simple options tend to gradually grow more powerful till, like water rising in a room, they squash the "high-end" products against the ceiling."
> Yes, they do. I am pretty sure they have already removed one application.

Two, I believe (though at the same time and by the same author)
Facebook's crowdsourced translations not moderated: hilarity ensues
There's an interesting point hiding in the virulence of this post:

Canonical engineers work on Ubuntu.

Red Hat and SUSE have historically hired swaths of "upstream" developers, often just to work on their own projects and propel Linux along. When I visited an Ubuntu Developer Sprint a few years ago, as a former KDE developer, I was surprised at how few people I knew. It wasn't that they weren't engineers; it was simply that they were working on Canonical projects: Ubuntu, Launchpad, Rosetta, etc., not j-random-OSS-project.

The interesting thing is that they've been trying to hire more upstream folks. Most core OSS developers don't have a problem finding a job. They've also been at this a relatively short period relative to Red Hat (and SUSE), so there's would be no surprise, even if the hiring practices were similar, that the total commit count would be far smaller.
> Does Android have the ability to remotely kill applications like iOS?

Yes, and they already used it a few weeks back: http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2010/06/exercising-ou...
Other Android Languages
For my MAC i use MacVIM/ Komodo Edit.
Despite all the furor about iOS needing multitasking, this detail is glossed over: on Verizon you can't look up something requiring data while you're on a call.

This isn't an Android vs iPhone issue: on AT&T my HTC Aria can handle a call while checking for directions on Google Maps just fine.

It's interesting how total failure to support the most common smartphone multitasking scenario is glossed over as a "niggle".

"So where is that?"

"Let me hang up, check, and call you back."
Something that I found odd: he seems to grok the transactional thinking.

I've seen plenty of people who only dip their toes in with vi and never get this. You feel the frustration when you watch them try to use it - pressing the 'x' key repeatedly, or navigating around whilst in insert mode.

I never knew about that ci" usage he mentions. Very handy.
Fantastic article. I've always believed the "language first" crowd, but it looks like (as always) it is more complex than that.

Though I wonder why Ildefonso wont talk about his experiences before he knew language? Could it be that he has no way (no frame of reference with which) to articulate it?
Problem with "authoritative answers" is it depends entirely on the user base (and in the case of Wikipedia, very active moderation). If Quora becomes massive it'll end up with plenty of trivial questions and unhelpful answers.

In that respect, the existence of Facebook questions might actually help keep out the chaff from Quora. It's not so good for the investors though...