skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's a bit all over the place.

His general point - do what makes you happy is fine (if utterly obvious, but that's OK, we can do with being reminded of the obvious from time to time as it tends to slip our minds).

But "Caring for the opinion of those who I don't care for" doesn't really relate to your parents and peers does it? They are, surely, the people you do actually care for?

The reality is also that many people may not enjoy their shitty office job but they do enjoy the money and stability it brings. There are days I hate my job but I also love the fact it lets me head off on holiday from time to time, treat myself to nice things and so on. I also enjoy sleeping at night not worrying about making my next mortgage payment or feeding myself.

I have no issue with people saying follow your heart, and when people assess the full ramifications of what they're trying to do and go for it that's brilliant, but it does bug me when people weigh one situation only looking at the bad and the other only looking at the good.

It's sloppy and generally it will lead to bad decisions.
IMO, Java is appreciated for the following reasons:

- there are plenty of reliable open source libraries (see Apache)
- it is easy to learn and to maintain
- the IDEs are good (IntelliJ IDEA !)

So, yes, this is still a valid answer, IMO.
> I think the article was talking specifically about humans, and not other species.

Um. Looks to me as if it's almost all about _neural plasticity_, which is not at all the same thing as being a generalist human rather than a specialist one. And the only thing I can find in it that says anything about one set of humans versus another is a comment about autism. (Whether there's evidence that autistic people have less neural plasticity, I don't know.)

And while I've only skimmed the paper they point to when saying that "one hypothesis holds that sleep is the price we have to pay for plasticity the previous day", I don't see anything in it that says anything about specialist versus generalist humans, or indeed about any group of humans versus any other.
Why do "the menial stuff"?

Because while people tend not to think about it much when they're in stable jobs, they also love not worrying about money, making the rent on time every month, being able to treat themselves and a bunch of other things that come with a regular pay cheque.
2 million users and they couldn't find a way to monetize them.
> Just give your users a manual on how to install gems (or pip, or whatever) and let it be.

Uh... that might work for one language, but for 10? 20? And some poor sysadmin is supposed to use all these disparate tools to install security fixes too?

And you're forgetting that there are "end-user" programs that depend on those libraries as well, so they really do need to be packaged up.

> That said, Zed is blowing this way out of proportion.

That goes without saying.
I saw the sign and it opened up my mind
If you really love it, maybe you can also make money with music. But most of the time, it probably means busting your ass waiting in a restaurant, I suppose?

I am not saying you or the article is wrong. I am just struggling to implement the idea.

I have some visions for quitting my job (only been here 4 months anyway), and finding some projects that might be fun enough to make me endure them and still make money - coding, that is. But assuming music is really what it is at, I just don't see how I could survive doing it at the moment.

I actually had a pang of frustration recently, because I really always dreamed about making music, and haven't done much about it.

So suppose I would like to dedicate my life to music now, what do you suggest I should do? Data points: I am 38, baby will soon be around, monthly costs exceed 2000€ (rent+health insurance being major factors). I can play guitar in a dabbling way (certainly no guitar hero). I might be able to compose nice songs, but don't have experience with audio software yet. Money might last 6 to 8 months.

I suppose I could get by being a street musician (never tried it), but that wouldn't be that much fun, would it? Also with winter coming around, might not be a healthy choice.

I think what I will try is creating a game (if I can muster the courage to quit my job) and compose my own music for it. That would be a start... If it works out, maybe other people could pay me for composing music for them.

Another thing with music is that there are so many extremely talented people already. I might have some talent, but I am probably not the next Thom Yorke. Plus, I am already too old to build a teenage fan base (assuming teenagers are most open to trying new music). If common wisdom is true, it akes maybe 10 years to become as good as Thom Yorke? But I only have 8 months...

This actually makes me wonder, what about the Thom Yorkes of software development? Somehow they worry me less - they might code faster than me, but I can maybe still find niches for my software they don't cover.
"Facebook is pretty much a black hole when it comes to communication."

Oh, the irony.
I believe, yes, Zed Shaw is trying to make a big claim. Reread the original post and you will see that he does in fact accuse them of liking to patch everything because they like control and lockin.

Will you do me a favor and file this bug report for me? I'm allergic to sanctimony which I'm sure is all you'll receive from the package maintainer:

"gem update --system is disabled on Debian. RubyGems can be updated using the official Debian repositories by aptitude or apt-get."
This particular case isn't that interesting because if the expression were equivalent to &(x+1) the compiler would complain about taking the address of a non-lvalue.

But ryanf, while not defending "that guy" (me), made my point for me: if I have to stop and think about whether -3^5 == -(3^5) because some hotshot didn't consider it manly to use parentheses, nobody wins.

If I were writing that expression I'd use (yes, completely unnecessary) parentheses around &a out of habit... the same habit that wouldn't let me write -3^5. Either way, it doesn't burn any more cycles.
So please draw out a scenario for me, how to get by doing music.

I live in Berlin - I think a lot of people here just live on welfare. Maybe I could do that (my girl-friend+baby would kill me for it, but still). But even that would also be work (lots of bureaucracy, moving to a cheaper apartment, arduous shopping for cheap food).
I can't stand this sort of article. They reek of naivety. When I was at university (and thus part of the 'general college body' mentioned in the article), I did what mattered to me. General mass-socialising didn't really matter to me, so I didn't do it, but as a result also didn't meet many individuals who might have eventually mattered to me. I spent a long time studying various areas within my subject that mattered to me - sadly they were never on the syllabus.

I ended up rattling around a shared house full of people that I largely suspected of hating me, slowly sliding out of school, having only the few things that did matter to me sustain me in a life that increasingly didn't. Doing what mattered to me got me through, but doing so at the expense of what mattered to other people put me there in the first place.

Sadly, the gung-ho tone of the piece would be spoiled by a notice that any extreme either way would be bad, but I think it needs to be kept in mind.
I think there is an important point here. Debian has a lot of control, and takes very little responsibility. A similar situation:

http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=380731
I keep having trouble thinking of Java as "fast"

When it first came out it was an absolute dog. Then Sun kept promising "faster than C" performance because of VM optimisation. The reality was that desktop apps were barely usable and the HotJava web browser was scrapped.

However, after over 15 years of VM optimisation and heavy use, Java is nice and fast. Its not quite up to C++ levels of performance but it is very respectable.
Bassdrive.com smooth liquid dnb!
What’s new in Perl 5, Version 13
> control and lockin.

That's a pretty absurd claim. Is there anything to back it up?

I mean, releasing an open source operating system doesn't seem to be the epitome of "control and lock in" to me. Ubuntu probably wouldn't exist if Debian were any good at "control and lock in", for one.

Also, your "bug report" is quite different than the one Zed points out. You're suggesting a fundamental change to the way rubygems works on Debian. That's something that merits further discussion, rather than a simple "bug report", obviously.
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I used to rage at these rates. But but - they are often cheaper than incurring an overdraft penalty at your high street bank. Barclays charge £22 a day for going up to £150 over your overdraft limit. God knows what it is if you exceed £150 over.
This is in no way specific to Ruby — if you look at the way any sufficiently advanced software you're familiar with is packaged in Debian, you'll find it to be completely fucked. Ancient versions, nonstandard configuration files, random things disabled at compile-time (often for ideological reasons), files scattered everywhere with the new locations hardcoded, with basic features broken into separate packages. My favorite is the random patches, which when they aren't in the service of the aforementioned ridiculousness, are mostly cherry-picked from current upstream versions to 'fix bugs' without accidentally introducing features because they're afraid of new version numbers. When a patch doesn't fit those categories you really have to worry, because now they're helping (see OpenSSL)

The result is that any program or library that you use directly must be sourced from upstream, especially if it's less than 15 years old or written in a language other than C or C++. Luckily pretty much all of the modern programming language environments have evolved to cope with this onanistic clusterfuck.

Haskell has more fucked by Debian than any other language I know of — when I last had to deal with it a year ago there were two broken+old builds of GHC with different package names and mutually-exclusive sets of packages that depended on them. On top of that the version of cabal (Haskell's packaging tool) in the repository was so far out of date that you couldn't use it to build anything remotely recent (including useful versions of itself), nor could you use it with anything in Hackage (the central repo).

My old roommate had listened to me bitch about this stuff for years, and always dismissed me as crazy for thinking that the packaging was fucked (though he did share my hate of debian-legal). Last week he called me out of the blue and apologized — he'd installed Wordpress through Debian and they'd broken it up into a bunch of library packages, but still left a base skeleton of random php files and symlinks, accomplishing nothing but breakage and unportability.
Rinkadink or Infected Mushroom
My dad is a TCM (Traditional Chinese Medicine) doctor. He told me that every hour slept before 12AM count as 2 times as effective. I tried it out for a few month going to sleep around 8/9pm. I usually find myself waking up around 1am. super alert and energized for several hours where I will do a lot productive writing and creating till 5/6am. Then I'll sleep for 1 more hour. And for the rest of the day I'm totally energized with no afternoon dip. I do think our current sleeping patterns is a bit limiting.

Here is a TED talk that touch upon the subject as well:

http://www.ted.com/talks/jessa_gamble_how_to_sleep.html
I think you shouldn't be hellbent on what you want to do till you enter other half of your twenties...I was not sure what do I really want to do for lifetime job and sticking to one thing is boring...socializing is kind of exploration. one shouldn't completely avoid it.
https://www.torproject.org/
> Dinner itself happens around 7:15. Everyone eats together at long white tables designed by our architect Kate Courteau. The general atmos is like a modernist version of an Oxford college dining hall, but without a high table

seriously?
I don't agree the APR is misleading. An APR is a normalised, comparable rate. That's exactly why you should look at the APR. Just because the loan is for a short time is irrelevant. It's like staying in a hostel and being charged a 5* rate just because you'll only be staying there for a short time.

Edit: the company you are borrowing from will be borrowing the money they lend to you at probably 10 - 15% APR (in the UK). That's quite a spread.
I think you have the order of events wrong. The connections (and other value) YC provides help you get that funding which lets you hire yourself into the US.

As pbiggar points out above, there's no problem (at least for EU citizens) getting into the US for three months of YC - it's staying there long term that's hard.
Mark Zuckerberg to Become Comic Book Hero, Villain?
Someone mentioned in a TechCrunch comment that there are other (up-and-coming) start-ups working on models that may be more customer-friendly.

Anyone know of competitors to green dot?

...I'd like to hear about some alternate business models being used for these services.
From experience I can tall that cell phones seem to work up to an altitude of about 7000ft in slow-flying aircraft (ask a skydiver).
I don't think it's anything to do with control and lockin, it's to do with the fact that Debian feel they have a far superior package management system and allowing other, inferior (from their perspective) systems is a Bad Idea which they'll fight tooth and nail every step of the way.

It does seem silly from a rubyist's perspective but their approach does make a heck of a lot of complicated software work together in a way that makes administering complex server setups a doddle compared to how it could be.

There's just a yawning philosophical gap between how the Debian and Ruby communities look at the world and approach software management.
Yeah, .com domains seem to be "out" these days.

*ify names are fairly common. Spotify, Storify...
...and people ask me why I write tons of freeware, but make so little of it open source.

The reason is simple: control. If I can't control every stage of the development, deployment, and distribution process, I don't want in (yes, I'm a control freak. No, I don't think necessarily a blemish on my personality, it's just who I am). If there's something wrong with how my users perceive my software, it's because of something _I_ did wrong, not because someone took my hard work and toil and perverted it with their own changes, be it making the code ugly with nasty function names or dirty hacks (in my opinion, of course) or if they distribute it in a way that makes users cringe. It's my hard work, and I deserve to be (a) in control of the user experience, and (b) attributed.

If you're willing to make your awesome utility/code that you've spent 5 years developing and maintaining fully available to the public, giving up all control of the end-users' perception of the package, you have a bigger heart than me. But me, I'm a selfish guy when it comes to my users, and I don't want anyone to even have the possibility of hurting them. I have _my_ users' best interest at heart, you probably don't. At least, not to the same extent that I would.
Vote for the Physics Stack Exchange proposal at:

http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/1908/physics
I'm not sure how much risk these outfits really run. They're not unsecured loans. You don't repay it, they'll call in the debt collectors and take away your TV and anything else they can get their hands on.
2010 Acquisitions - Google: 23, Facebook: 6, Apple: 5, Microsoft: 0
(interview) JJ Lumagbas -- Turning a financial glitch into an application
next will be merchandise of mark zuckerberg -- stuffed toys, candies, and such. =)

so for those other start-ups, if ur product will not succeed then try to sell yourself instead.
Reread my post. I'm agreeing with you.
OpenTable had a global chicken-and-egg problem where they needed restaurants on board to entice customers to use the site, but needed customers on the site to convince lots of restaurants that it was worthwhile.

Opzi's chicken-and-egg problem is broken down in to many smaller sub-problems. An individual Opzi is used by a single company or maybe even a single team within a company. Having a bunch of other companies and teams who are already using Opzi may help your sales pitch but is not inherently necessary for your team's Opzi to function. So I'd say the customer acquisition problem is easier than OpenTable's - with the caveat that enterprise sales is never a cakewalk.
will then create another tech blog. and aol will buy it again. duh.
The Future of Finance
Economic consequences of removal of Sunrise, FL from Google maps
> But here's the problem, Debian package maintainers don't want to give up control to the responsible parties. I would more than gladly make my own .deb packages, but they refuse to let me. In fact, I plan on making packages for the major Unices in order to head them off. That's what everyone ends up doing.

As a user, and amateur administrator of my home machines, I've learned the hard way that third-party packages supplied by the original software vendor are, in general, utter crap. They're built against a distro two or three versions old; or they're built for Mandrake or Ubuntu instead of Red Hat or Debian; they "install" a tarball to /tmp which the post-installation script untars in the root directory; they don't have any dependencies declared at all but crash at startup if you don't have a particular version of libjpeg... if you're relying on the packaging system to detect file conflicts or outdated dependencies, third-party packages can be very, very scary.

The single biggest reason I choose Debian (and sometimes Ubuntu) is the uniformly high-quality packaging. Zed's found one problem package, and a trawl through Debian's bug tracker will no doubt find others, but the fact of the matter is that with a single command I can install almost any Free software in the world, and have it installed and set up within seconds - and Debian has years of experience figuring out how to make that work. I don't think that's a thing to be dismissed lightly.
Unsigned integer types are needed for well defined modular arithmetic, and signed integer types are needed for, well, negative values of β.
>> Shelving is expensive.

> That is so true.

It is, but it's missing an even bigger cost. Walls are expensive. Housing space is expensive. Space for all our books has been a major consideration every time we've moved house. Crudely, I estimate $1-2/book for good shelving and $5-10/book for the space to put the shelves in, even taking into account the fact that the rooms whose walls you fill with books will have other uses too.

Of course it depends where you live. I'm in a part of the UK where housing costs are heinous. In San Francisco or New York it would be even worse. In, say, North Dakota, I expect it's a different matter.
I'll bite:

I'd say that it's more that if there's no (current) way to track what the other package management system is doing on the distro (any distro, not just Debian) then they can't tell what packages are installed and hence whether the distro-supplied packages can work with them...
Easy way to tell: try logging in with a bad password.
May I suggest another bank?

I get a £400 authorised overdraft limit on which I only pay interest (at a pretty fair rate) and no annual fee and in the UK that's not a deal that's too hard to find (First Direct in my case but I'm sure similar deals are available through others). Seriously, there's no reason to put up with that sort of thing and if you can get an account with Barclays you're unlikely to be turned away by too many others.

I used to be with Barclays too but this sort of thing is one of the reasons that I'm not any more - that and their general air of not giving a <expletive deleted> about my custom.
they don't know they will become the second biggest site.
Ditto.

I actually tried this search on DDG yesterday while trying some other tests and DDG's results were much more useful IMO.
Indeed, it's one of those videos that make you go "Damn, why didn't I think of that?"
Precedence does not matter, semantics do: pointer arithmetic is well defined, but taking the address of an arbitrary expression is not (and should not be, ever).
This because upstream projects usually can't be bothered to do integration work, and it's up to the distributions to do it and that means patches (which are normally separated from the upstream tarball in the source packages).

Debian adds patches, but so does Red Hat/Fedora. Since these are the two main distributions (maybe not by themselves, but because they form the base for most others), then you criticism can be applied to 99% of the distributions out there.

And bug reports about integration work should go to the distribution, and not upstream developers.
Can anyone comment if documentation is typically required (by the lawyers or startup) from an angel investor or is this assumed (scary)?
You could still make it open source but craft the license in a way to prevent redistribution
> You could still make it open source but craft the license in a way to prevent redistribution

Then it would not be open source.
Is that actually a serious suggestion? Is that what you'd tell your non-technical users when they asked you what an openid was?

Sentences that start with the word "just" should describe something easy to do. Like, you know, using your existing email address as your unique ID.
Amazing. And is that legal? In my country there is limit on how high interest rates can get. Maximum credit interest rate is ... 20%. Of course loan sharks are circumventing this rule in every way they can by requiring from you to buy additional services and insurances.
The reason I'm asking is I'm a non technical guy, and I would like to further understand the difference.
Okay, I can absolutely appreciate how hard making a distro is. Point taken. However, your comment also indicates exactly what Zed was furious about.

Debian is a piece of software that people depend on. They have a right to be upset when there are bugs. The proper response is to apologize and fix the bug. Period. Instead, your response is to blame the (already angry) user on the basis that they didn't submit a bug report. I would be livid if you responded that way. Yes, you do voluntary work. You get credit when you do good work. It's only fair that you take on the responsibility when your work isn't so good.

The Debian community can consider Zed's post a bug report. Now, go fix it please.
I read the first sentence, did not notice it was a quote and downvoted you. Sorry!
Thanks for the clarification. Given the way this cycle is bound to repeat, do you see any mileage in attempts to use typed assembly languages or other static analysis tools on things like the kernel? I've never seen them as worthwhile for application software, but they could definitely prevent this kind of bug, and if current techniques aren't stopping these bugs, then would it be worth the investment?
What's evil in payday loans? High interest rates. If Google was offering payday loans at 5% annual interest rate how would that be evil?

No profit for Google from such loan? How doing unprofitable things was any trouble for Google?
Why should the author report a bug when it's the incompetence of the Debian maintainer?

The 'gem' command not working after installing the 'rubygems' package does seem like a bit of a bug, to put it mildly, you'd think a cursory test by the maintainer would catch that.
A property which is exposed by the article's solution too:

>>> x = (lambda: (yield 1))() # generator with one step
>>> y = tuple(x)[0]
>>> y
1
>>> list(x) # exhausted
[]

>>> x = (lambda: (yield 1))()
>>> y, = x
>>> y
1
>>> list(x) # exhausted, too!
[]

Because that's just what you inevitably need to do to fetch a value from a generator. There is no peeking action or some such.