skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
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I think the author missed the point of Richardson's article. It's not about just accepting that you're a "bad programmer" and calling it a day, it's about accepting your limitations and constantly trying to improve your abilities and the tools you use. I think both of these guys are arguing for the same thing - don't get complacent.
Hi Hackers, if any of you are looking to work in a startup, feel free to send me your resumes. email id in profile.

Looking for those who can hack through and scale the product up using PHP/MySQL/AJAX (Not interested in fancy stuff right now, focused more on getting the product out through a stable platform).

We can even meet at Startup School. (But sending resumes before itself would be great)
This is really about a different point of view. The miracle is that they managed to teach the masses to look differently at the same thing.

Say, the price of a cheap food is always correlated with the cost of unskilled labor (there will be over-supply or under-supply otherwise), so, you can always easily escape a hunger unless you're sick or disabled. That is how poor people in a poor countries are surviving.

In the simple words, the conditions and relations are the same - rich getting richer and so on. ^_^ What is wrong is the digits written on pieces of a paper.

Think in terms of absolute values and there is no inflation or deflation or market crashes. You just have nothing to lose. You takes pieces of paper in exchange for your time and effort, you gives pieces of paper in exchange for a food and booze.

If you're earning more than you're spending it doesn't matter what digits are written on the pieces of paper.

If you're spending more than you're earning - you're in trouble. Especially in inflation, when your debt will be recalculated to stay ahead of it.
To Paypal or Not to Paypal…
The problem with that analogy is that people rarely respond if asked to do something as part of a group. By nature, a mass facebook request isn't personalized. It's like asking if anyone in the class knows the answer vs. picking on a particular student. If the request is made to the group, it is too easy to free ride on others.

It's not fair to compare all your friends on facebook vs. only your closest friends in person. If I sent a request for help via a group text to everyone on my phone I'd probably get less of a response than if I sent personalized messages to my 15 closest friends on facebook. You have to compare apples to apples.
Excellent point.

Gladwell's thesis is that high-risk activism and revolution are "strong-tie" phenomena and require real friendships.

He contrasts that with the "weak-tie" social media scene where people are friends on Twitter or Facebook, but wouldn't really risk their necks based on what their "weak-tie" friends tell them.

The "Save the Darfur coalition" Facebook page demonstrates what a weak-tie network can do and Gladwell's essay also talks about the (limited) usefulness of weak-tie networks (when he uses Shirky's example). It doesn't refute Gladwell's point
This article is selling snake oil. He cites 3 major causes of failure in large projects: "wrong estimation", "wrong status updates", and "wrong way of change management". Then:

> You’ve guessed it, Scrum adresses all of these resulting in 99% – 100% on target delivery. So it’s not due to bad programmers if an agile process can fix this.

At that moment I was tempted to perform a violent facepalm. He cites these issues as if a large project is just a five-person team sitting in a room failing basic communication. These aren't even straw men, they're more like paper dolls in a forest fire.

The obvious difficulty in managing >$10m projects is gathering and coordinating requirements, and distilling out from that workloads that can be implemented by individual programmers. This is a monumental problem. I'm guessing the majority of large projects never even come close to having an internally consistent spec without logical conflicts. The problem is that for software of this complexity it is impossible for any one person to have visibility into the whole scope of the project.

In order for projects of this scope to succeed what you need is several levels of extremely talented management with good technical sense in order to allow requirement conflicts to travel across team boundaries efficiently, and to make sure that the right domain experts can be brought into to correctly solve any conflicts that do come up.

To simply parrot the name of some agile methodology and then claim 99% success is an embarrassing display of ignorance for someone with ostensibly decades of experience.
I know geeks who use IRC and Usenet way more than the average person. So I'll probably be re-explaining this stuff to my brother-in-law all over again in a couple of years.
I recently "constructed" myself a standing desk out of about 20 reams of cheap printer paper and it actually works quite well and is easy to adjust. The monitor is on one stack, the keyboard on another, and the mouse on a third.

Also, I'm unlikely to run out of printing paper anytime soon.

http://drp.ly/kwP
For humans, a moral realist would say that while morality is closely related, it also can't be reduced to merely social cooperation.

Sure, I'd buy that. But I will also stand by my assertion that what you're calling "social cooperation" is sufficient for a workable morality to emerge. At no point is there a necessity for religion.
A computer is a man made device so there is nothing to be discovered in the sense that biology, physics, chemistry required discovery to understand how things work. A computer is engineered and that in turn requires application of chemistry, physics, thermodynamics, electronics and boolean algebra (which is a part of mathematics body of knowledge).

Perhaps we should be talking about "computer engineering" which is how we build computers and "software engineering" which is how we build programs to run on those computers. Both of these require considerable learning, experience and planning. Which probably explains why people want to avoid the "engineer" tag, because it sounds like less fun than HACKING.
Care to substantiate that? For instance, IMDB's facts are it's business, which is why some of those facts are reserved for paying members. Likewise, the fact Amazon has free public reviews is a big reason that people visit Amazon, just as the subjective blog posts of 37 Signals contribute significantly to their success.
I don't agree with the author here.

I think the social media websites do little or are actually detrimental in a way to causes such as the ones shes outlined. Sure they allow people to quickly 'donate' or shoot out a tweet, or change there profile picture as some form of protest. People will feel happy and think they have done something and then the it is all forgotten.

Case in point is Haiti. Everybody donates, concerts were held and everyone felt great. They assume there money was spent by some poor Haitian to rebuild his home. Yet no-one has followed up with the fact that the money isn't getting there [1].

[1] http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/cb_haiti_earthquake
How Social are America's Restaurants and Cafes?
There's no such thing are fake money, only false promises. Money is debt on the side of the government. Fake money therefore, is debt that the government defaults on.
I suspect that in many people's experience, "a solution that I am sure is correct" is anything but, until you've actually tested it. And testing it often takes far less time than puzzling over it and pondering. And so claiming that you never implement anything until you're absolutely certain it's correct smacks of youthful naivete, of the type common to college students who've never implemented anything.

In many of the more interesting fields, it's often not well-defined what it means for an algorithm to be "correct" anyway. What would a "correct" web search algorithm look like? How about a "correct" recommendation algorithm? A "correct" flight fare prediction algorithm? A "correct" stock trading algorithm? A "correct" Starcraft AI? There're "better" and "worse" algorithms for these, but there's no such thing as a "correct" one.

For many problems that do have an obvious "correct" solution (eg. OCR, face recognition, fare optimization), getting there is a nearly intractable problem, and the interesting part is in figuring out how you can approximate it as well as possible with the resources you have available is the best you can do.
Police Raid Yale Party With Assault Rifles To Catch Underage Drinkers
Weird, I've never been charged cover at Old Pro.
eh, I don't know. I think testosterone does alter feelings and behavior in fairly shocking ways, far beyond what you see when you dress differently. Do you remember puberty? I went through puberty later than most of my peers, as far as I can tell (I didn't get shoulders until I was well out of high school, and the shoulders corresponded with developing a sex drive and other feelings one associates with puberty. Now, I don't know if it was a coincidence or not, but this was also around the time that I started eating meat.)

And yeah, the aggression was pretty shocking at first. I can remember feeling like the hulk. "my god, I'm huge!" I'd break things by accident because I was stronger than I expected. by that time, I considered myself an adult with a job and I was surrounded by people who were forty plus years old, so I didn't actually pick fights with people, but I'd be lying if I said I didn't want to.

As far as I can tell, this isn't particularly unusual for young men (except, maybe, for the timing)
"2.3% of Americans recycle their old phones and 7% throw them away" - I'm guessing that means most people either have a bunch of old phones lying around their homes or they are traded in when they upgrade. Regardless, http://www.call2recycle.org/ looks like a good option for recycling(I have not used them personally, just did a bit of googling), let's save that lithium, people!
Yeah, corporate compared to noisebridge. Uncorporate compared to most other places, although I would still say the dojo is a little more corporate than a lot of other hacker spaces (in a good way).

I like both noisebridge and hacker dojo.
How can one say "where are the alpha geeks" and then say "please don't mention Linux on the desktop" in the same damn posting? Unix is where they all headed. That OS X has a GUI that you can _completely_ ignore while you're in the perfectly usable terminal with bash is a sexy proposition. Then again, there's always Fedora with GNOME.

The geeks that I knew first started with .mod files. Remember those? Those were terrible-sounding representations of music. The beat tracks were mixed with "instrument packs" that approximately recreated the melodies of songs. They were passed around usenet and on places like Undernet IRC. Then we all moved to .mp3 and the Napster beta. Then AudioGalaxy. Then eDonkey. Then gnutella, then bittorrent. All the while, alot of the geeks stuck with usenet.

While "everyone else" played Playstation, we were making quake mods and "total conversions". While the rest were chatting on AOL, we were IMing with ICQ. When the public zigged with Windows, we zagged with Linux. Now, there seems to be a strange convergence toward OS X. Maybe _that's_ what Benjamin is talking about? The convergence?

Here's what happened. Geek culture merged into mainstream culture. The geeks that used to be shut-ins and social outcasts are suddenly normal in the suburbs. Put them in some big scary city with a questionable populace that has a perhaps less-than-honorable stance on high intellect and literacy and they'll be the same outcasts they were before the Social Network was #1 at the box office. But for now, geeks are the EF Hutton of modern culture: They talk, the masses listen. And retweet. And Wall. And submit to reddit/HN/etc. And, when an alpha geek suddenly gets attention, I believe they stop being a geek.

Maybe the bible had it wrong: it's the _g_eek that shall inherit the earth. Perhaps we're at the tail end of the "hey, let's all be/act stupid as hell like we're rich heiresses or supreme-court appointed drunken presidents, derp" phase. We're now entering our "meritocracy or bust", Libertarian-ish hyper-intellectual Vulcan mind meld phase. The geeks stopped living in the basement and started living in the now. They know the future of business, hell _America's_ future, is in technology. The geeks he's talking about are now Mark Zuckerberg, are Paul Graham, are Elon Musk and Steve Chen and Notch. They're building. They're launching. And, they're monetizing. It's a great time to be a geek. So much open source software and open APIs to hook into. So many frameworks and languages to evangelize and adopt and exploit and forget. The world is gigantic breadboard from Radio Shack, and we're all Captain Crunches looking for the right frequency for our Blue Box.

Perhaps the alpha geek is post-"user". Now, they're (we're?) trying to be Creators.
There is no such thing as a "real value" as measured in a vacuum. Value only comes in relation to something: a commodity or a basket of goods. What they did in Brazil was to establish a new currency which the government promised not to inflate, then as inflation destroyed the previous currency, the way was open for the new one. This is how inflation was ended in Weimar Germany, post-WW2 Hungary, '90es Serbia/Romania/Russia. Only Zimbabwe handled things so poorly that the national currency vanished completely.

Even if people learn the value of their inflating money with respect to more stable things, inflation STILL eats away at the value of their savings. It does them no good to learn prices are stable (with respect to an arbitrary standard) except to learn they are indeed getting poorer.

Also, freezing bank accounts and banning the trade of foreign currency only makes matters worse. People not being able to access their money does make them poorer still.

1. You can't inflate at leisure without destroying the currency.
2. You can't have a peg to a foreign currency if you keep inflating faster than that currency's central bank.
3. You can't then cover up for the misdeeds of the government by denying people access to their savings.
Mobile roaming charges within EU should end, official says
I agree with almost every word you have written.

And I would like to add a qualifier to what you have written: What you say, is the present.

The present is not the future.
Hey, thanks a lot for the feedback. Now I understand why you have 40k karma ;)

I put a lot of work into this site and to have it only get 3 comments and 2 points was kind of a let down, and also kind of confusing.
> Since JPEG is lossy just by adjusting the quality level you can save JPEG in any size.

And get a blocky crapbucket as a result. By making unused/un-displayed sections of the JPEG (or PNG or whatever) file easier to compress (which still requires some basic insight as to how the file's compression is performed), you lower the file's size at constant perceived quality. That would be the point.
Oh yeah, I remember seeing this. How's is going for you? Getting much traffic?

I launched http://www.moreofit.com awhile ago and was on the frontpage for awhile too. Got 4k uniques, which trickled down to 100 in about 24 hours. Since then, I get about 200 uniques a day :(
It might be terrible from a usability stand point (or it might be an improvement), but if the point is to share the link verbally and not via a text link [or if doing so will litter the web with broken links], why support direct links at all?

Why not just have an input box on the home page? The user puts in the english word, and you do the redirect.
This is probably true, the fact that you can't completely separate the author from the story. Where I disagree is going in "whole-hog." I consider it fundamental for a journalist to make her best effort to keep her opinion out of the story. To me, that's the definition of the format. News is not supposed to be about the person telling it.

If I am to believe what people said here (and I have no reason not to), Thompson adhered to a higher standard in his writing. As I said originally, I wasn't trying to say anything about him as a person or a writer. I just don't see high standards amongst our major networks. For issues that are important to me, they simply fail to report the basic facts when they're reporting their opinion.
Do you have a lot of earthquakes around there?
I do want to buy a good, adjustable standing desk. Any recommendations?
I think we can agree that my 60 second test wasn't very scientific (nor was it meant to be), but I'm confident that the result is still typical of the type of savings you'd see using a more controlled process.

Since we're nitpicking, I might as well point out that you can't "cut out" portions of a jpeg either.
We have switched ESPs 3 times since our startup launched... it would have been great to have all the data on a service like mixpanel instead of starting over each time. On top of that, we also use a mix of ESPs and our own mail servers from time to time, so mixpanel's service would help there as well to consolidate everything.
This was a common technique in game development a years ago, back when gospel was no larger than 10MB for downloadable casual games. You can get great compression with GIF/PNG for alpha channel and JPG or JPEG2000 for color data. The downside is you usually get multiple compression artifacts on screen (assuming texture compression like DXT), which doesn't apply for web use.
When people who have stiff muscles sit for long periods, cortisol levels increase, as muscles need to work constantly to keep them in position. Sustained high cortisol levels has a lot of negative impacts on health.

But if flexibility and good circulation are restored to these muscles and the sheaths around them, the muscles can easily handle keeping a person upright and cortisol levels are normal.
Hmm, SF Bay Area. Interesting point.
I think you can solve that, to some degree, with a cache (if it's performance that's troubling you) or a simplified facade (if it's the complexity of the deep stack).

Yes, those are indirections.
I would also like to hear a place to find a basketball game
Similarly she trots out the Tehran protests which I seem to recall being debunked pretty thoroughly as another feel-good American media frenzy, but with almost no effect on the ground in Tehran. For instance, most of the major Tweeters at the time were not even in Iran, and people involved in the actual protests were not tweeting at all. At best it raised American awareness—especially within tech circles, but very little tangible impact.
I don't think the Alpha geeks are failing. I do think that computer literacy has increased as younger generations have grown up with technology and also, because a lot of smart alpha geeks have improved the usability of the technology (two forces meeting so to speak).

It is a little bit like the motorists of old - they were first really weird, then being good was largely regarded as being ultra cool as others battled with the new cars, then they were sponsored in races and now they still exist. They exist as kitset car builders, engineers, racers, and oh dear... boy racers. The alpha geeks may not use the latest technology (some Linux users manage to keep their machines going with their skills) but hasn't it always been the skills and knowledge of the geek? If that's the case, I think we are doing very well. The improvement in usability of the internet and easy availability of knowledge means the barrier to entry is lower which means more geeks. On the other side of the spectrum it also means more non-geeks know how to fix their computers etc. Rather like cars. However, being able to replace a battery doesn't make you a car enthusiast, nor does being a savvy Facebook user mean you could build it.
FWIW, I personally got myself a basic ELFA set http://www.containerstore.com/shop/elfa/bestSellingSolutions... . Cost me $350 down here in australia with a simple two desk setup. Also had to go through the hassle of getting a handyman to set it up, and then a comfy bar stool for switching between sitting and standing.

Closer to $500, and not as much surface area as a regular desk, but great Swedish quality and definitely a relief for my back.
OpenOffice is dead, long live LibreOffice
I think "corporate" might be the wrong word. I agree, though, that it is much more business oriented than, say, a linux users group, or many of the other social places I hang out. It's more like the culture you see on hacker news than the culture you see on LKML.

but it's very oriented towards small companies; while there are a lot of people with funding there, we also see a fair amount of bootstrapping.
Officially known as "diffusion of responsibility". It's the reason why, if you are a witness to an accident and you are attending to an injured individual, you are supposed to point to a single individual bystander and tell them call for an ambulance rather than say "someone call 911".
You can't bend the laws of physics though. There isn't enough stored energy in local sunlight, plants, wind or anything else to meet the needs of the airforce, army or whatever. Unless you're splitting atoms locally.

No amount of technological progress is going to change the fact that sunlight, plants and other local sources do not posses enough energy unless you split apart their atoms.

You have to transport energy in large quantities to undertake warfare. The only possible way around this is with stored electricity, except that stored electricity doesn't power most of the machines of war.
PHP class for Goo.gl
Thanks for a flash-back with the mod-players.

You also can add FidoNet (dialup modem based mail exchange network - think about Usenet with access over uucp) as a 100% geeky activity.

btw, what's wrong with a desktop linux? Here I have Chromium 7.0.547.0 (61463) Ubuntu 10.10 - which IS a pretty good desktop.
My "nerd" friends (I hate that term) are fiddling around with robots and hardware. Stuff like Arduino and mbed. I'm trying to spec out a DYI book scanner robot that can automatically scan all of my old books.

But frankly, I don't think that's very nerdy. My blue collar friends that welders and electricians build stuff like that all of the time.
My fear is that it would be an opportunity for an old trick of theirs: embrace and extend. If so, we'd be in the 'embrace' phase.

I'm hoping not. They've been getting more open-sourcey in the last couple years. One alternative is that they just saw a great model and have no need to reinvent the wheel. It means an easier .net onramp for developers who already know jQuery.
A Better Way To Hide From Google
"So my question is, why haven’t the nerds moved on?" +
"Please don’t mention Linux on the desktop. Seriously." ?

Let me paraphrase the post: "I have a random thought that is edgy but not well thought enough for me to permit reasonable counterexamples."
What should we teach new software developers? Why?
Dr. Seuss would be proud.

Or Baudrillard.