skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree with the nearly all of your points including most especially the moral hazard point: the bailout of Bear Sterns appears to have encouraged complacency on the part of Lehman Brothers and holders of their debt. One of the latter, the Reserve Primary Fund (a pioneer in the field which had been boasting about the quality of the assets they held), "broke the buck" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money_market_fund#Breaking_the_...) and as far as I can tell that started a cascading failure of the world's financial system and my approval of intervention at that point and only that point is based on this.

I agree that discovering the new price is not a calamity, my argument is narrowly limited to keeping the financial system going so that process can happen in a orderly fashion. The Great Depression in the US was immeasurably worse due to all the bank failures triggered by this sort of thing (and I've read this seems to be a mostly US phenomena due to regulations which kept banks small and limited to one state (heck, when I arrived in Massachusetts in 1979 a bank couldn't cross county lines; my bank (BayBank) had a holding company on top of their individual county banks)).

The vast, near total majority of "bailouts", like the multiple efforts to prop up residential real estate prices in the US or Cash for Clunkers (which at best moved purchases forward in time and in the latter case amply demonstrate the Broken Window thesis) are not called for.

An edge case of possibly justified intervention might be keeping GM and Chrysler alive so that the failure of the suppliers wouldn't put Ford out of business; that would be another example of a cascading failure, but a hopefully limited one and obviously spending less money by only keeping Ford's supply line intact would have been a lot better.

ADDED: Here's Andy Kessler in the WSJ on "TARP and the Continuing Problem of Toxic Assets", due to the bait and switch (I supported the bait...): http://www.google.com/search?q=%22but+no+one+could+decide+wh...

(And, yeah, I've grown rather fond of "misapprehension"; it's great for situations where someone has gotten part of the point but the rest is succeeding for the moment in getting away.)
Foursquare iPhone app now supports SSL
I once ran a project with four contractors working remotely. My previous management experience was not remote, and I generally chatted with each person each day. So part of the setup was that I spoke by phone with each person each day just to keep the channel open both ways. I also required an email report from each person each day. Finally, we held a weekly meeting in person, which worked because we were geographically close.

The other thing I insisted on when assembling a team was that they had a room in their house that they called their office and that it had a door.

Not everyone can handle telecommuting, and sometimes the bandwidth of detail/culture/chatter is not enough to sustain the good productive relationship.

You should strongly consider Campfire. This will support communication necessary for remote working. Make the presence in the campfire room required.
When I see people jailbreaking their iPhones to support flash, and flash works well, then the community should talk. Can't agree with you more.
Looks like there's a "normal" one; take a look at the sixth line in the 'All Characters' tab.

I'm using it now and it's all good, too.
When Eating and Exercise are Out of Balance, Productivity Plummets
Piwik hits 1.0 - Open source web analytics
I haven't had a chance to check re: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1623482 but this could be good hole fixed, especially since so many users undoubtedly use the same password everywhere.
Hey Mark, if you're reading this: your font looks fantastic, sincerely on par with Inconsolata. BUT, the pointer arrow -> renders with the dash off center from the point of the >. It's too much of a distraction to switch.
Can you explain that "flash and pedigree" line? What is that? Is that basically having the right upper-middle-class background? Your next sentence seems to imply that it's related to the economic status of these 24 year olds.

If that's the case, as per your last paragraph, what's the incremental improvement that "flash and pedigree" provides?
OT: When quoting the Simpsons TV show why don't people credit the writers instead of crediting the fictional character.

If someone quote "If music be the food of love, play on ..." then they credit Shakespeare (rightly or wrongly) not the fictional Duke Orsino of Illyria.

Sorry, but it bugs me.
Why not pay the $20 or whatever fee for Yahoo Gold and have it forward for you? Then you can switch to a different service, Gmail if you wanted. You'd probably be a lot happier in the long run if managing your email is a pain right now. And Gmail can forward your stuff for free.
Hey, sure I'll remove the link to Halogy. That was totally not the idea behind mentioning the site - it's non-biased. There are a lot of competing web apps on there, so the link at the bottom is purely coincidental. I'll remove it now just to avoid any suspicion. Thanks for pointing it out.
This has been discussed before: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1442056
New Kindle Leaves Rivals Farther Behind
My droid has similar hardware and it works pretty good without overclocking, check around though because I don't have firsthand experience with a G1 but they do indeed still make roms for it with froyo.
They already maintain it as a searchable database, which is an even better thing to have—and online, which means you don't even have to store it yourself! ;)

The point of the hardware is that owning the Unabridged OED is an experience, and, if they want to sell that experience, they need control of both the hardware and content. Plus, people are irrational: give them a thing to buy (and to show off) and they'll feel much better with their "investment" than if the result is just 3GB of DB2 files.
I'm guessing it's internal, put together by Google people on their 20% hours.

Technical people can be creative, too! At least, that's what I'd like to think.
I am not so sure that this is an analogy. These are different names for new things. Except for 'folder' as opposed to 'directory'.

You sort of lost me there with the electrons thing. Are perhaps you really meaning the abstractions that enable you to not have to think about electrons while writing code.
It's my (self-appointed) job on HN to also remind people that if they love Inconsolata, but hate the curly quotations, you can get straight-quote Inconsolata-dz.

http://nodnod.net/2009/feb/12/adding-straight-single-and-dou...
How the technology enablers for the Cloud Phone are falling into place
That's a good looking code font. However, I still love my Droid Sans Mono :)
I think Anonymous Pro looks a lot like Consolas, only a little less bold. Also, a little more "packed" - I assume this is due to decreased font height, which for me works great sometimes but it can be cumbersome to my eyes.
An amazing product that I've been following for the last year has reached the 1.0 milestone.

I don't use GA so can't comment on feature parity. Importantly (for me) it has a powerful API, plugin architecture, easy integration, dead easy multi-site configuration.

I can't speak highly enough of this product.
I don't know. The thing I consider AutoCAD uses tons of mouse buttons, keyboard shortcuts, and macros. If they removed those features can it be considered AutoCAD anymore?

I guess if you want to only view DWG files then being able to rotate, zoom, or transit are all you need.
What happens to the associates who don't make partner? Do they go independent, go to work for clients, go to second-tier firms and have another go?
Oh, so many memories of playing FirePower and Impossible Mission!
Easier link http://wambook.sf.net/
Been using it myself since... around 0.2 or so, very satisfied.

The upgrades were painless too, which was a nice surprise - I expected a few hickups during the earlier releases, but found none.
http://bugs.python.org/ is running a customized version of Roundup.

Source is here. http://svn.python.org/view/tracker/roundup-src/
This font is not new. This re-release has been out over a year and its predecessor (Anonymous) has been around almost ten. I've seen it in plenty of "best programming fonts" articles.

That said, it is nice to have something different from the usual simple sans model of most modern monospaces (e.g., Deja Vu Sans Mono, Consolas, and Inconsolata). Anonymous has a lot of character – which either interests or annoys you.

It's been my default in Vim for some months now.
I think the point is that if you fire 1 as an example, the other 4 will improve. So pick the worst and lose him. If you do indeed need to fire all 5, then do it at once and pay the remaining people more.

I'd be surprised if the problem is that more than 50% of your programmers need to be fired . Maybe 1 or 2 and better managament for the rest. I don't think you need a manager for 8 people, but you probably do need to do a little better yourself at managing. If you are the leader/owner of the company, and it has 8 employees, then you are the manager whether you want to be or not.
Brilliant, didn't know about that one. Thanks!
I've used AutoCad with 2 button mice and 16 button mice--- either works. What might be a little style cramping would be the size of the iPad. Still doable though.
I had to stop using Inconsolata because when it is a pixel or two wider when bolded (by Eclipse or other editors). Perhaps I installed it wrong on my Ubuntu machine, but I couldn't figure out how to fix it.
Having spoken to actual CEOs, I think it's a bit of a stretch to put them in the same class as famous architects and composers. The latter are identifiable, and to some degree quantifiable, skillsets that require training and a certain degree of talent. I'm not so sure you can say the same thing about being the guy who makes sure that cross disciplinary paradigms for excellence synergize with the vision's core values.....
I think it is possible for you to do this. Greasemonkey for Firefox allows you to run Javascript that modifies the way pages work. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/748/

Actually, I found a script that claims to do exactly what you need! http://userscripts.org./scripts/show/71859 It says you have to edit the source to change which emails go where, but it seems much better than nothing.
Exactly this. The image of the lone hacker sitting down and pouring out a bunch of code straight from his brain is a romantic one, but if you haven't spent a little time deciding what your data structures are going to look like and how you're going to pass stuff around, etc., your code will be crap. "Just coding it" leads to both frustration as you sit wondering what you should be writing and why programming is so hard, and poor code. The poor code comes in when you start throwing in stuff like one-use elements in your structs to keep track of something you hadn't forseen, when a little bit of planning could have alleviated that.

I'm certainly not saying you should go write up a design document complete with UML and everything. That would be ridiculous, damn it I'm an engineer not a bureaucrat! Just sit down and think (on paper) about how some of the important stuff needs to look. It'll help a lot.

As for the second point, C++ does seem like a weird place to start. Go learn assembly or C. Learning to write assembly is a process of continually solving tiny programming puzzles, as you figure out how to hand-roll a loop and such.
I could see this doing really well, if marketed well so that people besides HN readers hear about it. With college football season starting, perhaps there is great opportunity for use.
VMworld Day 1: Electrifying
The Humble Programmer, by Edsger W. Dijkstra
Forrst: http://forrst.com/
The Prolific WordPress – Infographic
I guess the iPad and iPhone versions will be more or less just DWG/DXF viewers. I can't imagine anybody willing to do serious CAD work on the iPhone anyway :-)
The Interaction Design Association has a pretty active community: http://www.ixda.org/
"A clear ticket queue and test suite are indicators of good habits, but they have nothing to do with getting work done."

Really? How's that? If the tickets and test suites (for example) where your task, then how is completing them not an indicator of getting work done?
I tried learning prolog. I had a class on it in college and it never really clicked. Then a tutoring gig fell into my lap a few years later for the same class and I ended up getting "it". And even then it wasn't worth any additional exploration. I learned python and pay my bills.
Direct link to the paper (PDF, 473 KB): http://userweb.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/ewd03xx/EWD340.PDF
Linux, Windows, or Mac?

Point sizes vary due to DPI. I used 11pt on Windows, and ProFont (bitmap, 10 or 9, I don't recall) on Mac.

I think it's only Windows where you can get relatively decent clarity for aliased fonts at a smallish point size, depending on how good it's hinted, due to how ClearType renders it.

Mac is a bit heavy, and Linux is just bad, the shapes on Linux look nothing like any other OS.

Aside: Yes, I know about the byte code interpreter option and patches to FreeType, but even with that it's still bad. Most programmers I work with unfortunately are just type blind (can't tell difference between Tahoma, Arial, and Segoe, and italic/non-italic of each, for example, leading to "interesting" font choices in UIs).
Be happy with whatever you're happy with.
The Amiga remains magical to me, having grown up programming it and having had more "aahaa!" moments thanks to it than any other computer in particular.

I still have things like this, floating around in my brain somewhere[]:

.loop: move.w $dff006,$dff180
btst.b #6,$bfe001
bne.s .loop

It was so awesome, a computer with a great CPU, intriguing and poweful custom hardware for graphics/sound, and still a very decent operating system on top. It had it all. Sniff.

[] Somewhere slightly shady, since I mis-remembered the two first register addresses, and also the sign of the /FE0 bit being read by the third instruction. Still, it's been 14 years since I switched to Linux, so I'm kind of happy.
Well, first of all the "world's most high-profile climate change" label is extremely dubious. Unlike the opposing view, skepticism doesn't have established institutions, and a multitude of "leaders". When I read that title, the only person I could think of was actually Steve McIntyre from climateaudit.org.

Second, U turn?! Let's be serious. Bjørn Lomborg has always believed that global warming is one of the top global problems, but that it's too expensive to tackle it and we should spend our money on other issues instead (e.g., in his 2007 TED talk http://www.ted.com/talks/bjorn_lomborg_sets_global_prioritie...). The only difference is that now he appears to believe that global warming can be stopped with less than 0.5% of the US Federal Budget.
Dlp lamp canada
Dlp lamp Source - DLP & LCD Television lamp replacement and Front Projector Lamps Distributor.
Review our startup: Lanyrd, the social conference directory
I didn't even notice the curly quotes until you pointed it out. I guess today I'll either decide I don't care or get maddeningly frustrated and download Inconsolata-dz :)
There is a difference between not having done something and regretting not having done something.
Unfortunately, its nice auto-hinted varieties do not kick in before 11 points, and doesn't really look nice until 12 pt. If I had an 11 or 12 point defaulted in my terminals, there is no way I'd be able to put more than one or two of them on one screen at most--and even then, with overlap--which sort of defeats the point.

To use this font, I need it to work non-crudely at 9 or 10 pt too.
Droid Sans Mono Dotted! ;)
> Even if Apple wanted the iPad to support flash, how could they?

Give Adobe the green light to dust off their previous work and complete it. No one will make a serious effort at Flash for iOS before gaining approval from Apple.
Judge Rules Cell-Site Data Protected By Fourth Amendment Warrant Requirement
Put each niche in its own subdomain. The main domain aggregates the subdomains. Never post on the main domain first, only the subdomains.

Also, try to get some active commenting. Google loves to see users engaged on a blog page.

You do have a 4 year old domain, so that should lend some authority to your site.

But, yeah, I agree with you. Google has rewarded and incentivized the dilution of information.

Many of your blog posts could be split up into multiple parts. To a visitor, that experience sucks, but to Google, it looks like you have so much more content, because it has it's own page.

If you want traffic from Google, you have to play the game.
In terms of looking at energy use and production, I cannot recommend David MacKay's excellent book Sustainable Energy – without the hot air highly enough (http://www.withouthotair.com/, also available in dead tree form.)

It's not clear that Lomborg changed his mind; it seems like he fudged the process the Copenhagen Consensus was using to get a politically acceptable result - 'Lomborg said he then decided to consider a much wider variety of policies to reduce global warming, "so it wouldn't end up at the bottom".'

He's always advocated development spending should be cost-effective, which makes sense. To that end, he has always said we should ignore climate change for now and concentrate on things that are profitable now, then cut heavily latter if we need to.

However, I think this is the wrong way to discount the far future. On the one hand, we have relatively little certainty about what our culture will be like in a hundred years. On the other, we are fairly certain man-made climate change is happening now and will have increasingly damaging effects.
To wait for some point in the future where research and development will make the problem go away cheaply is irresponsible and naive - '"This is not about 'we have all got to live with less, wear hair-shirts and cut our carbon emissions'. It's about technologies, about realising there's a vast array of solutions."'

Clever solutions appeal to clever people, and no-one wants to wear a hair-shirt, but that's not an argument against actually making some compromises. Or, to put it another way, he got five economists to make long-term predictions about sustainability and they said "increase energy efficiency, do some R&D spending, business as usual." How surprising.
> A large part of the problem in the NBA is

guaranteed contracts (which is magnified by poor management). A team can be crippled for 5 years by a bad contract, something that cant happen in other leagues. The talent pool isn't the issue. The talent has gotten better over the years.
Any programmer who says "I spent three hours talking to my computer" is not a programmer. It's true that if you push someone on their vague talk they may become more concrete and specific. I'll grant you that there are CEOs out there who, once you get past the nebulous weasel-words, can articulate a clear plan for what the company needs to do and where it needs to go. Those are good CEOs.

I would bet the vast majority, once you push them on it, would respond with more of the same, and if you continued to push them on it, would ultimately defer to an underling for specifics.

It's not even the mumbo-jumbo that annoys me. It's fine if you want to say that a CEO sets the direction, goals, and overall plan of the company. I can believe that, and it's certainly valuable. What I cannot believe or accept is that they deserve to be paid an order of magnitude more money for doing so.
I don't know, at least in a FOSS community, revealing yourself as a woman seems like a good way to get plenty of help, swift replies, and votes for positions of power. I've seen it before ("Jill for list moderator! She's the greatest!"), but of course that's also a good reason for a woman to remain anonymous--not everybody is cut out for the fawning adoration of 15-year-old GNOME coders.
The term "hacker" has been transformed by those outside of the original hacker subculture to mean what others have stated above. As someone who programmed computers for almost 20 years, I never regarded myself as a hacker. Since the definition of the word has been broadened, I would definitely be considered a hacker, yet I still don't have a strong connection to the word.
You could build a small app to do this with twillio. Patrick did:

http://www.kalzumeus.com/2009/12/29/twilio-phone-call-web-ap...

http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/01/15/deploying-sinatra-on-ubu...
Try browsing for a new car or clothes. For whatever reason both of those verticals are highly dependent on Flash and as such unusable on the iPad. I would have thought luxury brands would have figured out by now that iOS demographics trend affluent and should be valued.

Update: Case in point...

http://hugoboss.com - usable mobile site, but you can't see or buy any of the clothes!

http://bananarepublic.gap.com/ - "Flash required" error message and the same goes for the other Gap brands

http://gucci.com - it's just a black screen

http://dior.com - "Flash required" error

Etc etc, it's nutty. Car sites are a little better and usually break in more subtle ways (videos that don't work is common). Cadillac actually has a nice iPad optimized site, so kudos there.

http://mazdausa.com - redirected to a really low-fi mobile version with much less information. A step up from WAP, not much.

http://bmwusa.com - same as Mazda, a really horrible mobile site that is a column about 200px wide

http://www.miniusa.com/ - "Flash required" error page
Get an office.
Have regular meet-ups.

I heard of one telecommuting company who flew everyone to one location every couple of months, and he reported great productivity increases.

What are you doing to increase moral?

Are you providing regular thought out requirements? Tied together with some sort of joined up thinking - not just random whims. Nothing worse than them getting a part requiremnt, you expecting them to get on with it, and then you moaning at what they've produced. Either be available to talk through requirements ALL the time when someone is working on a unit of work, or provide solid requirements.

Are you having regular releases? Something to celebrate.
Nothing more demoralising than endless todos.
Do you have a goal for your current iteration?
Do you have development iterations? (fortnightly or weekly sprints seem to work well for a lot of people)
What are you doing to mark the end of the week? One telecommuting company I know has a virtual beer together, on a Friday at the same time, to review the weeks progress.
Have you provided an environment to screen share with ease?
Essential for talking through how to approach a problem, or figuring out why something isn't working.

Hmm. I work in an office. I'm about 2000% (add more zeros) more productive than at home. I'm sure you'll get plenty of advice off actual telecommuters.
I think it's less about whether Apple has Flash and more about how Gruber deals with dissenting opinions. I've seen him do hit jobs on bloggers for their opinion and small-time indy programmers for their design with no provocation.
I've been a die hard programmer font snob for years and have been using Bitstream Vera Sans Mono or Deja Vu Sans Mono. Mostly because it's free and can be used on all platforms.

Then, Apple released Snow Leopard with Menlo. It had just enough small little changes that at a slightly smaller point size it was easier to read. I fell in love. I've actually now trained my self to really enjoy using 10 point unaliased Monaco on small screens and enjoy it immensely as well.
"Up or out" is often the model in professional services firms.
There's a pinned answer over at their support forum, so it's not just you:

http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/gmail/label?lid=613f70...

Didn't they do something similar with the Pacman thing? Sounds like they don't have enough computers with working speakers...