skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Megan McArdle misses the biggest reason why tuitions are sky-rocketing and that is because Government funding is disappearing.

It's not clear this is the biggest reason, and she doesn't actually miss it, either. She states we could just "shift the burden from students to taxpayers."

In fact both of you completely ignore the most important question: What is the tuition actually paying for? Where is the money going? Government subsidizing those costs doesn't make them go away and merely fuels demand, which probably causes raises costs even more. A subsidy could keep tuition down, but that would not discourage waste or increase the value of education.
I played with Dive Into for a while. The problem has been that I just haven't had anything I've needed to code for a long time. Being a once-programmer, I've always arrogantly assumed that I could just jump back into coding, what I'm finding though is that nearly 10 years off was just a little too much. :)

This was a one-off for that particular task, so no cross platform writing, but I'm certainly use os.path in the future. Thanks for that!
> I don't think it's too long before I can switch from one window to another by just looking at it and twitching my eye.

Most X11 window managers support the option for Focus Follows Mouse, where simply hovering over a different window will make it the active window, and after a short delay, bring it to the front of the window stack if necessary. Just combine this with "Multi Pointer X" and a gaze tracking camera that acts as another mouse input, and you could have what you're looking for...
Could you provide a starting point that has some news? First I had no reception, then I zoomed on SF (random pick) and ended up with "no news for this area".
Cool! Involved with = owner/founder?

I like the lisbeautiful concept, that's got a positive vibe to it. Profitable?
The shape shifting future of the mobile phone
http://www.pixycity.com/
> And somehow make sure the loneliness doesn't spread

I went to the first meeting of loners but it was canceled due to insufficient attendance.
The whole story was pretty light reporting. You're right about that. I just didn't get why that one quote in particular struck you as being representative of bad journalism.

These stories come out all the time in the financial press: Apple hit some arbitrary milestone… lets try to get a one page story out of it. As long as they're disclosing interests, I'm ok with it.
This video was interesting, but also seems relevant in relation to the other story about Ubuntu getting physical, which shows a web-cam based UI interaction paradigm.
How to choose the right Online Collaboration Suite?
Learning all the intricacies of a framework takes a lot of time. Once a time, I was all for learning new things, but guess what: I discovered that old tools still delivered.

Sometimes the less dependencies factor matters too. Having to quickly develop a diagnostic application for users to download, a couple of years ago, guess what I chose: Visual Basic 6. Right, that ancient tool. No matter what, the application was easy to develop and the executable was a few kilobytes, with no requirements other than Windows 2000 SP4.
I am sorta envious of the guy.
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Computer and Computational Science
Lisbeautiful — yes. Co-founder and coder. Not profitable yet, but it's working on it.
Fairbooks — not co-founder. Did a lot of work for it before it launched; circumstances didn't work out to be official, but I'm still involved. (It's two really good friends.)
I had an idea the other day that I think would make a useful side-project (probably short of a full start-up concept) but it suffers from a problem similar to yours. But not in the way that, presented with the solution, they wouldn't like it. More so in the way that they would never know to seek out that solution - it's a problem you might spend $50 on as a shortcut rather than 3-5 hours of professional time, but you wouldn't even know what to Google for if you suspected there was an alternative out there.

If you're getting the product in their faces and they aren't responding, that's one thing. If you just can't reach them (short of doing it manually, one by one) then I guess that limits your SEO options and you might be best off targeting/advertising towards areas they might research/read.
I knew that the shapes in the orange boxes on the left were probably letters and numbers, but I honestly could not tell which ones they were (especially just looking at the top one, which for me right now is "6am"). I ended up copying and pasting the text into my address bar to read it. I'd suggest a different font. (I'm on Win7/Chrome Beta).
I'm not expressing an opinion on the case either way, but comparing Paul Chambers to John Betjeman is rather flawed. There's a big difference between "I wish someone would bomb X", and "I'm going to blow X up".

Even out of context, Betjeman's line couldn't possibly be interpreted as a threat.
Richard Branson's secrets to business success
India has created over 300,000 jobs in the US
Myth: regular old html 4 isn't good enough for you.
There's many things that make a man. His dress, his words, his actions, and these are all suppose to be a reflection of his character and integrity. Be careful which one you pick to judge a man.

I'm not defending Dave's actions at this meeting, merely his writing style. I'm glad the Valley has room for the likes of Dave's writing style. The day the Valley values professionalism over actual value give is the day I leave, since I can go to Wall Street for that. Suits and the Whole Nine Yards.

The second time I'll invoke Tara:
"The less confident you are, the more serious you have to act." - Tara Ploughman
No company should ever have a noreply email address
Clojure. It's mildly exotic in being Lisp-y and functional, but efficient, clean and solidly supported by the gigabytes of Java library code that's available for every purpose and can be smoothly interfaced.

Lua. A tiny yet powerful language whose only data structure is the associative table. Can be learned in half a day.
By "fast lane", I believe icey is refering to lane 5, not HOV. He is saying lane 4 is better than lane 5 because of all the people switching between land five and HOV. He's not saying that lane 5 is better than HOV.
Coders must reprogram how they write for Wall Street
Thats great you found
For those of you who always wanted to try clojure but never got around to it, swannodette's enlive tutorial is very good.

http://github.com/swannodette/enlive-tutorial
Uncle Bob: The Hacker, The Novice, The Artist, and The Craftsman
Emergency Contraceptive Debate Rages In The US
If Google doesn't extend the deal, someone else (or multiple groups divided by language or geography) will.

It's not a charity donation, it's a fee for getting your search engine in front of 300 million users.
> Is it just a matter of good sales and marketing?

I can't really remark on specifics, as I have no clue about the industry your targeting. However, hopefully some of this will click.

First, to answer your question: Yes.

Simple enough. However, what are your sales and marketing team doing? Obviously not selling. But how are they going about doing it?

Trade shows? Trade magazines? Cold calling? Flying down and meeting with people? All of these are methods my sales guys used when I started my company. Trade shows were the best. They let them promote their product, and actually talk to the people involved. They got to know their potential clients. You aren't trying to sell a product. Your trying to help them run a business.

You need a good feedback loop from your sales guys, too. They can't just sell. They need to market. They need to bring the clients to you, but also you to the clients.

Basically, you need to become apart of the industry you are targeting. Right now it seems like you are trying to sell something to them. That's not the right way to look at it. Basically, how can you help your industry.

You discount their reasons for not wanting to join as being traditional. Why? Not the reason they give you, but really, why? I find a lot of the reasons is that, in truth, the technology route is often more cumbersome for a large number of things.

But really, it all comes down to meeting the people in the industry and becoming apart of that industry.

I remember the first trade show we went to. Our booth had banners and marketing material, and my sales guys pimping the promise of a product we didn't have completed yet. We kept going back, and went to many more throughout the world. It's much easier to get someone to try your product after you've met face to face, shared a drink, or taken them out to dinner.
The title doesn't really seem to fit the blog post; in fact, the word "seo" isn't even used in the body of the post.
Try "Praha" it has one news so you can see how it looks. Or you can easily create your own, which would be great. I deployed the site today.
I also plan to translate the site to german language, I from the Czech Republic, so there will be more news from Germany.
Is that what the Firefox search page is about? I always switched it to the real Google page. Was I doing Mozilla a disfavor by doing that?
> Please keep this confidential even though I know that will be hard since two of you let your egos take over and show Arrington how important you are by telling him you were headed to a “secret” angel gathering.

So true.
Maybe considering an upvote on new while it's not on the frontpage yet as submitting the article (and thus getting karma according to the votes on the article) can help. Then upvoting good articles on new gets very attractive.
Fuck you ASP.NET
Another line from the home page, this one above the fold, says "An environment for Ruby". I know it is a language implementation, but to me, that sounds more like an IDE than a language implementation. [Also, the home page doesn't know about 1.1 yet. It has 1.0.1 as the newest version. That can be very confusing.]
It all depends on how well Firefox performs.
I like big fonts like in http://www.hackerblogs.com
If you're not trolling me and are generally confused, here is where I'm coming from.

I think the confusion is that I work for a big corp that do software as a central part of their business -- I'm not writing applications with shiny buttons on administrative applications (desktop or web) ordered by monkeys in suits.

I'm here to write lots of functionality and teach people. For that, we use scripting, open systems that are flexible -- and pluggable. I can always change what I plug in, with the limitation of having to teach people.

If it was the best solution, we would e.g. add a Windows machine and script Excel. The main problem would be that stuff in Microsoft applications tend to work badly in the next version and it is a f-ing pain and waste of money to rewrite stuff you implemented well a couple of years ago.

(Lots of other people here work as army ants on big projects where they should be replaceable. They use Java or C++, deploying little to Windows. I do server apps, not embeddable here, since I love the speed of creating functionality with Lisp, scripting languages etc.)
XIPH: Episode 1: A Digital Media Primer for Geeks
Got it. On security, you might try and test to see whether the added security you offer is meaningful to your audience. The security offered by web services is already sufficient for me to share my most personal emails and financial information.

I like the idea of a simple beautiful interface where I can look back at my journal entries easily.
I didn't downvote you, but my perspective on the 'if you want it fixed, do it yourself' thing is this: I've been tinkering with computers for a really long time. I've had some fun times messing around with Linux, tweaking it, getting it set up, etc.

But I'm at the time in my life right now where it's no longer fun jumping through 100 hoops to get something working at an acceptable level. I just don't have time to fix it myself. I have my own codebase and business to take care of, and I want my OS to work with minimum fuss without me having to dig into the Metacity codebase and patch things myself.

It's very true that anyone can fix it themselves, and it is indeed a beautiful aspect of Linux and OSS. But things like resizing windows should just work at this point, because I don't have the time to mess around anymore.
The Microsoft Tanker Has Turned and You Ignore it at Your Own Peril
VideoEgg Buys Six Apart to Build 'Conversational' Media Company
Gene Weingarten: I hate Facebook sooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo much. . .
Agreed. Decent flow, find a cleaner font, it wont take long ;)
Relevant links:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Categorical_list_of_programming...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programming_paradigm

I'd say learn Haskell, Clojure, and Scala before anything else because they seem like they might actually be 3 of the best programming languages out there. After that I'd recommend Oz (in conjunction with the textbook Concepts, Techniques, and Models of Computer Programming, which Peter Norvig mentions as being a possible modern equivalent to SICP (Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, a classic MIT Scheme-based text)), Scheme (with SICP), and Erlang.

Can't say I've done all this myself, it's just what I would do if I had a really strong interest in learning new programming languages.
The probability of this discussion thread ultimately containing at least one `rm -rf` must be close to 1.
I agree with you but he's probably using it in the same watered-down sense of "wage slavery". This is also a contradictory term but it's now in common use.
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This is the shit: http://zim-wiki.org/ The best feature is you can type cntrl-j and it gives you an autocompleting text box with which you can jump to any page. This saves a lot of time.
FBI investigating 'Here you have' worm
You could quote Greenspun's Tenth Rule of Programming, and say therefor you skipped the error-prone process of increasing complexity-building.
Many SMT systems are based on European Court, but Google's had people working on acquiring parallel texts for years now and has one of the largest corpora of parallel texts in existence digitally, as far as I know.

Quality is logarithmically proportional to the volume of unique text available. Thus, there's a rough formula for every doubling of the corpus for any language, quality increases by a few points (on a well known scale of translation quality).

The general assumption is that over time this statistical technique, along with the growing data acquisition of Google, will approach human quality.

But you can assume Google's tried to acquire tons of available parallel texts. Book translations, government (any multilingual gov't is great, Canada for ex), religion, etc. Sky's the limit.
First, make sure that your customer feedback methodologies are valid. Make sure you're solving a problem and that it's not just something that's "nice to have".

After that you have to face the brutal possibility that the "very traditional methods" reach a certain threshold of ease/cost that it makes other options negligible. As a business owner you have hundreds of mini problems to solve. Once one is solved, you move on. You don't have the time to waste re-solving old problems, even if there is a newer, better solution.

But if you're certain your product is that much better, you have to start at the bud: new businesses. The businesses that just starting to learn to apply those "very traditional methods". Jump in there, offer them your better alternative, and get them to start using it. You're not gonna take over the market overnight, but slowly through word of mouth and good testimonials you'll get your customers to cross that chasm.
Agreed, suggested title change: "blogging tips".
Actually Joel, your assertion that dhh simply needs to look up valuation in the dictionary is absurd. Valuation is not neatly defined. It's hugely subjective -- especially for private companies.

>It's like you wrote a blog post arguing that it is >incorrect to refer to a 5' tall boy as 5' tall because >he's often sitting down.

It's not like that at all. It's more like comparing a 5' tall boy with a 5' tall light pole and deciding that valuation is based on height alone.

>It's weird, it's like in Chicago they don't have multiplication or something.

Yeah, good point.

md
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How Facebook fixed the site: they turned it off and on again. Literally
I think we 'code writing nerds' are to some extent influenced by the machines that we interact with on a daily basis, we learn to spot the 'bugs' before they bite us by mental emulation.

Computers have the uncanny ability to do literally what you told them to do, but rarely what you meant. So when someone says something (even in poetry) we tend to temporarily suspend our humanity and we read it in this exact literal sense, out of sheer habit, and respond just like the machine would respond to us to any inconsistencies or ambiguities.

"Tea or coffee? Yes, please."

Little children sometimes go through phases of this kind of behavior too, and as a programmer I can usually have a lot of fun with them by playing the game right back and watching their responses.
Ircle - Gah! That's like everything that was ever wrong with GUI design. Disconnected windows implies disconnected functionality, overly complex design, buttons . There's no indicator that the input area has anything to do with the chat log. I can see why the interface styles are moving away from that type of design. IRC is supposed to be simple Ircle makes it look like I'm piloting a nuclear sub and a squadron of UAVs at the same time. I know it's old, so it gets a free pass for not being up to date on UI design. But the thing I find hard to believe about Ircle is that it lives on Macs -- the holy sanctuary from bad UI design. (and I'd like to point out how very few controls they jam into the menu bar at top, Ircle is a perfect example of Fitt's law in non-use).

CS5 - Tabs can be a powerful thing when done right, CS5 does not do them right. I strongly dislike Photoshop's tab implementation. Though I'd never in a million years hold up Photoshop (with its aging wretched evolutionary interface cruft) as an example for people to follow in UI design.

Maximize - I've known many people who use the exact phrase "maximize every damn thing" when referring to people's desire to maximize windows to focus on one thing at a time. I've actually sat down with them to discuss their UI behavior and observe how they use their smaller non-maximized windows. What I discovered was fascinating. Instead of focusing on one particular thing at a time, and moving their mouse around inside screen sized real-estate, with nothing else cluttering up their visual field, they focused on one particular thing at a time except they had a much smaller area to work in, things became cluttered and they often got distracted or confused by non-relevant stuff in the background. They spent inordinate amount of time moving windows around to get them positioned well to not be distracting or so they could see them all well (as if the other document they were writing was going to suddenly change state without their notice and they wanted to see that happen - yes this was how it was described exactly to me), and fiddling with toolbars so they were "just so". If I didn't know better, I'd classify most of the behaviors as OCD type worry twitches. The real problem is that if you want to maximize and focus on a Mac, you simply can't. Whereas on Windows or many Linuxes, I can choose either method of operation -- like if I writing some code and have a separate app up logging network activity or something, I can do that. But if I'm having a particularly bad time killing a bug, I simply can't maximize and get everything else out of the way.

There is a built in efficiency in killing off tasks serially that you sometimes can't get when operating in parallel.

Thanks for the command-option-h tip.
It seems he thinks you should do more "liberal arts" to understand his point and see the "slavery" here :)
Less pain for learning gain
ah cool thanks :)
Panasonic's robot gives a 16-finger, automated hair washing
David's point 2 is a good one. It is the reason why bourses insist that a large percentage (IIRC >25% for the LSE) of share capital is in public hands at all times. (Where "public" means people or organisations not associated with the directors or major shareholder.)

Nonetheless, Joel's post is quite funny.
So, returning to my question which one is the better?

I can't give you the answer to that question, nor can anybody else, as it depends on a lot of factors. What I can do, and have been trying to do, is to help you identify what those factors are so you can answer it yourself.

You have HR experience; that's good. You say you know exactly what is needed for a Recruitment management tool. That's also good. Of course, before you start developing, you're going to want to validate your business idea. You need to do what's called "customer development", and make sure that the product you are designing meets the needs of others in the field, and not just your own needs (when you were working in HR).

You'll also want to look at the competition. What other Recruitment management tools are out there? What are people currently using? By looking at these, and talking to prospective customers, you should be able to get a good idea whether having this app on the web will add value, or only add risk (in terms of security).

Which brings me to my final point: being "addicted to programming" isn't going to help you. To create a piece of Enterprise software, you're going to have to know one platform inside and out. You're going to want to have already developed several smaller (non-Enterprise) apps on this platform. And, you're going to want to have a staff of developers that is already trained and comfortable on this platform.

The recent mess with Diaspora is a good example of what happens when people try to build complex, enterprise-quality software on platforms they don't already know intimately.
Linchpin, by Seth Godin. It contains the most food for thought per page of any book I've read recently. Check out some popular quotes from it on http://kindle.amazon.com/work/linchpin-are-you-indispensable... ... it's the 11th most highlighted Kindle book for a reason.
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Ironically the true literal interpretation of "Every moment dies a man, Every moment one is born" is more correct than Babbage gives credit for.

If one and 1/16th is born, then certainly one is born!