skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's along the lines of what I was thinking too. The cost of making a penny isn't really material to the fact that it's worth 1 cent. That'd only be relevant if pennies were used one time, which then would be an issue.

But pennies are re-used multiple times. So a cost of two cents is fine when you consider that.

Now a better question to ask is what are the transactional costs of maintaining prices that require pennies (as oppose to, say, 5 cent increments). Those costs are the better ones to look at, I think.
hmm, X10 is to Erlang what Scala is to Java?
Another missing bias: people tend to think of wealth in terms of income rather than accumulation of assets. That is, they think in terms of what comes in over the short term rather than what's built up over the long term.

To clarify: imagine a society where everyone makes the exact same income up until retirement (50 years in the workforce), and everyone saves the same percentage of their income each year in a personal retirement fund. Assume also that retirees spend their assets down to zero by death in a linear way. In this society with perfectly even income distribution, wealth by quintile will be as follows:

Top quintile (40+ years working, or newly retired): 36%
Second quintile: 28%
Middle quintile: 20%
Fourth quintile: 12%
Bottom quintile (<10 years working): 4%

According to the article, the group "most heavily skewed toward a top-heavy distribution" (those earning >$100k) gave their ideal as only slightly out of line with this. I don't think it's rational to conclude the "most skewed" group actually believes wealth should be distributed according to an almost-identical-salaries-for-all model; I think it's more rational to conclude that the people surveyed are using a flawed mental model of wealth that doesn't properly account for accumulation over time.
Love the plants and the open floor plan. Time to ditch the fluorescents though. That is a deal killer.
Hooking up to tools your target audience already use (like Basecamp) might be the best solution for team sharing
Cash is just an artificially controlled commodity. The fed uses interest rates as a tool to control its scarcity. If the Fed made money more scarce that would be good news to people that own a lot of it.

Low interest rates and inflation cost rich people and help poor people.

If I've got $1,000,000 sitting in my bank account and interest rates are low, I'll earn a low return AND get hit by inflation.

If I've got $200k in debt and interest rates are low. I pay less to finance that debt, and inflation means the dollars I pay back are worth less than the dollars I borrowed.

But things that help 'poor', and hurt 'rich' aren't always good. Low rates do encourage reckless speculation, additionally inflation can drive value out of investment in anything backed by the dollar. Ideally inflation keeps pace with the growth of the economy.
You can get after-market 320gb upgrades, though they only work on the 5G series (iPod Video), not the Classics. But yeah, I too would pay quite a lot for a half-TB iPod.
Youmixer is an interesting idea, but have you thought of features such as localized comments on the playlists itself (if it's between friends) or chat integration?

One thing that comes to my mind is making a desktop plugin/app of YouMixer and using an online interface (or through wifi) to play the local music stored on a user's computer.

So, my friends can see my music collection on their PC and play the songs for me and we can share common likes through the youtube idea. That way you can have an interesting mix of social interaction and music. Here's a scenario;

I'm chatting with some guy and we start talking about music he opens up my page on youmix and selects the songs that he likes from my library and plays it for me. Or, recommends me something through yourube (that gets downloaded onto the player) and I tell him my thoughts about the music.

I haven't talked about streaming music due to copyright restrictions, but personalized and decentralized internet radio stations through something like YouMix would be a damn interesting idea.

Email me if you want to continue this discussion. As far as the design and stuff goes You really need to change the logo.

Take care and thank you.
It's been a long time since it had a large role in CS curricula outside of operating systems / embedded stuff, I think. The intro classes when I was a freshman (2000) were transitioning to Java, but from Pascal, not C. The industry-focused classes (software engineering, etc.) all used C++.

I think I would personally have disliked C if college were my first introduction to it, because I associated it with curmudgeonly systems professors and a sort of harder-core-than-thou attitude. But for some odd reason I had already learned C in high school (I think I picked it randomly), and it's a perfectly enjoyable language to use, without the cultural baggage. You can even write things other than schedulers in it!
Around Halloween, real fright arrives on campus
Are Apple going to ship any sort of Java runtime with 10.7? I (and some of my team) use Intellij on OSX. Are we not going to be able to upgrade to 10.7?
The type of employees YC companies look to hire are probably never in need of jobs (thus they will have problems hiring, in any market). To solve the problem mentioned on the news segment, we need companies that (for lack of better words) are aiming lower.
Just sent an email to you and CC'd Jason (I'm a co-founder). Looking forward to the feedback!
I have been doing independent consulting for four years and for me it has been far more lucrative than keeping a normal job. you need to be a competent programmer, but the key is having contacts, getting jobs, and getting people to like you. I have mostly made money working for business with java and .net. most Ror jobs pay way less.
Although that's true, I would guess there is possibly far more competition for those jobs from a larger quantity of Rails programmers than Django programmers.
Jobs, Adoption, and Community - plenty of adoption of both, but I've seen more Rails opportunities than Django

Scalability - you'll be fine with either

Fun - Rails

After completing a bunch of PHP projects, I recently completed a project for a client where I spent about 6 months with Django. It was fine and I'm glad I did it, but I can't say I would call it "fun". There were a few points that I found painful. The django admin is customizable and for certain types of apps, it works well. But I wanted my clients to use it to manage data in a legacy database. The inspectdb command was cool and generated models for me along with some data management forms. However, getting the forms to work in ways that matched the workflow of my clients was difficult. I found myself wanting to do things like a "reverse" inline -- there were several things that I couldn't figure out and StackOverflow searches didn't reveal good solutions. On my next django project, I decided not to use the admin because it took me longer to figure out how to customize it then it did to just use ModelForms outside of the admin. I haven't found many of the contrib apps to be all that useful or flexible.

And for reporting, some of the more complicated queries just didn't work well with the ORM, and I found myself doing ugly things to avoid writing SQL (I know Django doesn't prevent you from writing raw SQL).

I just didn't get the same "fun" feeling I did when I first developed a Rails app, first grabbed a Vimeo API or flickr gem off of Github, and first pushed it up to Heroku and saw it magically work. And I didn't feel like I was any more productive than I was with PHP -- the main benefits were that 1) my code was more readable and 2) it led me to another opportunity in a completely different area that involves writing python -- but rather than Django, I get to work with Twisted, and this has expanded my horizons greatly.
Font rendering: I realize jMockups might only render "web-safe" fonts. But I would love to see an iteration that incorporates any typeface shared between a team of designers who have fonts locally stored. I have made attempts to switch to Inkscape, but it's inability to render different type formats is what is holding me back from using it.

Drawing path tools: This would be handy if I needed to create arrows and icons. I suppose I could draw them and import them as images; however, it would be really nice if I can draw them in directly!
You have a point there, but I suspect the actual reason for the rotary-phone sound's continuing popularity is that all of the other stock iPhone ringtones are lame as hell.
Depends, ..

Mr. Babbage tells me we can make a computer out of wood. And our wooden computer can simulate what an electric cable does. And that's what Turing tells me. Not that we can write any program with a Turing complete language, but that we produce the same computational result, quite possibly by simulating the other programming environment, just as we might Greenspun Lisp into every other programming language.

So when discussing media, no we can't make a bamboo bicycle that has exactly the same weight and strength as a carbon fibre bicycle. But then again, we can't write an assembler program with the same number of lines as the equivalent Haskell program, so those differences can be hand-waved away. The point is that we can make bicycles out of either material, and knowledge of the material is different from knowledge of a specific tool that works the material.

I think your point is interesting, but I'm not convinced that my suggestion is leakier than comparing C to hammers. I stand by my suggestion that hammers are more like IDEs than programming languages, and that there is a very important distinction between IDE as a tool and programming language as a tool. I reject the latter.

To borrow another Perlisism, "The debate rages on: Is this metaphor Bactrian or Dromedary?"
I think the problems with [non-native] GUIs on the Mac are compounded by their developers likely not having as much passion for look & feel as Cocoa-heads to start with, regardless of the quality of the APIs.

I was under the impression that the IntelliJ IDE was a diamond, then I saw a dude use it in a screencast and the design looked grim.
Hmmmm, I have 49 domains. That's costing me $400 a year. I'd say a good two dozen are active(ish). They just seem to accumulate...
Squatters are pretty vile. I've never had the opportunity, but I've heard such domains can be obtained relatively easily if you have an existing legit company(doing actual business) and can threaten litigation.

That seems extreme, but I think of it like real-estate: If your business buys a warehouse, you may have to hire an exterminator to clean out all the parasites that have set up their nests therein.
Is that so? I find it hard to imagine a currency in which the smallest denomination available is the equivalent of five dollars.

If you're inventing a new currency from scratch, why not have a smaller minimum denomination?
Well, checking in that much hardware (encrypted or no) on a commercial flight is of course incredibly poor tradecraft.
Might depend on how you define "sensitive."
The problem domain you're working in is also important. For example, if you're doing heavy duty number crunching for finance or image processing, Python has NumPy, for which AFAIK there is no equivalent for Ruby.

Then again at very large scale you don't want to restrict yourself to one language in which case you can lash together various components using a distributed job scheduler like Gearman (http://gearman.org/).
Really? Why? Users should rely on the browser indicating a secure site via a padlock or some other indicator. I would imagine most real users would not know the difference between http and https to asking them to base their security decision on that is misguided.
They haven't said yet, but: "Developers should not rely on the Apple-supplied Java runtime being present in future versions of Mac OS X."

http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#releasenotes/Java/Ja...
Link to article: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/10/21/60minutes/main6978...
Who cares about privacy at work?

I highly doubt they have HR walking around trying to catch people viewing something inappropriate.
This isn't a complaint, because although some may be tired of this question being asked, I personally enjoy the subject being brought up a lot, because of the new perspectives and quick pace of development for each project, but you'll find a lot of additional insight by back searching for "Rails vs Django", too.

There is no right answer, and you can't go wrong with either. Try both, run through _many_ tutorials for each, and decide.

Remember that everything sucks. Find the one that sucks less for you.

I'm still more productive and knowledgeable in Python/Django, but find Ruby/Rails/Sinatra more fun, and I enjoy the new ways of thinking it causes in this old Perl programmer.

Downsides?

I'm still trying to grasp many of the concepts in Ruby, and the rapid pace of development and prevalence of trends is daunting. Many things in the Ruby world are hackish and/or poorly documented. I question DHH's wisdom.

For Python, the indenting thing still bugs the bejeebus out of me. I'm not a trendy kind of guy, but it is a bit too untrendy to me.

They're both great, overall, though. Find the one that matches you, because nobody else can decide that for you.
> The Java crowd will (...) have to make a choice: either use Windows or Linux for development, or get away from the IDEs (...) on the Mac.

According to archgrove's post, Eclipse works on OpenJDK:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1820288

So Java crowd can continue to develop on Mac in Eclipse even without Apple-maintained Java in OSX.
Gracias. There's currently a plan which lets you create up to 5 mockups for free and there's also a Pro plan which lets you create up to 200 for $24/mo. Lots of other ways to monetize down the road depending on how the cookie crumbles.
Er, can’t you just specify that the session cookie is only sent over HTTPS?
Do you get excited by pitching, doing sales, hustling leads, negotiating deals, and reading contracts yourself?
Because this is half the work of being an independent consultant. You're both the biz guy and the tech guy, and if you don't like being the biz guy you're going to HATE being a consultant.

But it's been a hard, disappointing slog at work.

For most people, it can be an even longer, harder slog to find clients.

I put out several applications to other salary positions to have some way to get out, but given my timeline I think the independant route has better potential.

In all likelihood, it will take you far more time to find your first few clients than it will to get a full-time position. Finding clients is a crapshoot, and it takes a lot of time. Even if you do find a client, it usually takes longer to close a consulting deal than to get hired for a job. What are you going to do if you don't find clients in time?

I have what I think is a very solid resume for 6 years of experience, having lead two dev teams in the past three years, but I don't have any sexy tech like RoR or Django, nor any certs for my .NET and MSSQL experience.

What kind of consulting will you do? Without this details, it's difficult to comment on how you might acquire clients.
While I do agree with you that we are great for newbies you'd be surprised at the number of tech-savvy clients we have who simply don't have time to be their own IT guy anymore. This may mean our messaging needs to be revised completely, but I don't think it's true that we're for newbies only.

Case in point: Most of our income now comes from very large WordPress sites serving millions of page views and terabytes of traffic. These customers want to focus on their business and not keeping their site up.

In fact when we do change up our messaging it may be split down the middle. One part newbie friendly WordPress and one part enterprise level services for a fraction of the cost.
Here's a different approach to this problem - Take your home network with you!

I recently signed up for Clearwire's CLEAR service. They have a MiFi component that does "4G" with fallback to 3G if necessary. This gives me up to about 3MBs, with portability (up to 3 hours on battery). There is no data limit for "4G", and you get 5GB per month on the 3G fallback network.

Anywhere I travel inside the US, I'm using my home network, and isolated from public networks.
Wonderful user guides, but somewhat incomplete, apparently.
I am not sure about Philadelphia but there are lots of 6-12 month contracts in Washington, DC which involve you working on Govt Contracts. Most of the positions are for Java/.NET. If you are willing to relocate for 6ish months then it might be worth a try to check out jobs on dice (contract to hire etc).
Being and independent contractor, don't expect to have work coming your way as soon as you decide to become and independent contractor (unless you have networks who are willing to give you 1099 right now).
Another option is to hide from your employer that you only need work for less than a year...
But pennies are re-used multiple times. So a cost of two cents is fine when you consider that.

Right, until you get to the point where the metal inside a penny is worth so much more than the face value that it becomes worthwhile for somebody to start melting them down. Luckily that doesn't seem to be the case yet (at least not with the new-denomination pennies).

They're still pointless coins, though. Get rid of them.
"was" being the operative verb. This was two years ago.

Nonetheless, I just looked at those three links and IMHO, the Django docs are more concise and well-organized:

http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.2/

For me at least, it's all about maintainability and parsimony, two things that Django/Python has in spades and for which excellent central documentation is a necessary requirement.
Could these bees be solving an NP problem in P time? Could they test that by increasing the number of "cities" and seeing if it takes the bees exponentially longer?
That's pretty much me. I can't tell you how to do some arcane task in code, but give me a week and I'll get a working website doing pretty much anything you want. Give me a few months and it will be polished and ready for anything.

I know I'm not in the minority, as hackers/entrepreneurs, we know ourselves and have drive. Too many employers disregard true results-focused driven people because of a "lack of skills".
Here is the first one I made (I sold it back in May on Flippa.com for $350): http://www.techspyer.com/ I learned on this one that I needed to focus on content more than spammy affiliate links.

Here is an example of the content I paid someone in the Philippines to write: http://www.techspyer.com/tag/digital-camera/ (most of the tags have a "buying guide" at the top)

All of the "posts" are just coupon feeds from Linkshare's RSS feed. This site made $10-15 per month for a solid year. The total cost is as follows:

Domain: $7.49 (GoDaddy)
Hosting: Free (Unlimited accounts on Rackspace)
Content: $24 - $2/article x 12 articles
SEO: $10 in backlinks from SubmitEdge

The total income over 12 months was about $150. I assume the site would have continued to produce $10-15 per month indefinitely with no more effort on my part. I sold it for about 2x yearly earnings (I have no idea why the new owner hasn't activated his own Linkshare RSS feed).

For the other sites, I prefer to keep those private because they are in untapped niches and I don't want to invite competition, but for those I focused on content RSS feeds and AdSense instead of affiliate links and they make about the same amount of money per month.

I'm going to try to do some more of these sites...I keep telling myself that if I registered 1000 domains and put simple sites like these on them at $41 each, I could turn $41,000 into $10,000 - $15,000 per month. Of course the hard part is getting started.
No, I don't think so. I was referring to emptying your short term memory so that unwanted thoughts don't disturb your thinking.
I recently instituted a "no domains after midnight" rule. I've dodged a few bullets with that one.
Complexity/simplicity isn't everything. If an abstraction layer is more complex than its substrate but is also more consistent, intuitive, bug-resilient, maintainable, etc. then it may be a net win.
The shady stuff they did with IE6 mattered because MS was already so big when they did it.
Can't we map other NP complete problems onto TSP and then have these bees solve them for us?
In my experience, the only people who actually prefer writing web apps in raw SQL/HTML either 1) have never written a real web app or 2) tend to write highly insecure code without even realizing it.

A few things that web frameworks/libraries help with:

Forms:

- Validation & displaying errors & input sanitization.
- CSRF checks.
- Safe file upload handling.
- HTML generation is useful for removing a bunch of boilerplate.

ORMs:

- Default SQL injection protection.
- Query objects help you construct complex queries without having to do a bunch of
string manipulation.
- Database abstraction (e.g. moving from MySQL to PostgreSQL is a lot easier).
- Database migration tools to help you upgrade your schema.

Templates:

- Inheritance & replaceable blocks reduce a lot of boilerplate code.
- Tools to help you safely escape user generated content & transform it for web
presentation.

Misc:

- User authentication. Rolling a secure implementation on your own is no small task.
- Secure cookie and session management.
- Providing an organized architecture with sensible separation of concerns.

Now, to be a solid web developer I agree that at some point you're really going to need to understand the fundamentals of how each of these things works under the hood, but you're crazy if you'd rather write all that code by hand instead of using solid, well-tested, existing libraries for it.

Note: That's not to say that using a web framework will automatically make your code secure (the recent Diaspora debacle clearly demonstrates otherwise). However, you've already got so much code to worry about securing in your own application, why would you want to have to hand roll everything else too?
ISIWEB | The Best For Everithing OK?
Gold is going to be around for another 50 years, and you'll be able to buy things with it. The US Dollar however is not.

I'll tell you what I tell everybody who thinks there's going to be US Dollar hyperinflation: I bet you a trillion dollars that's not going to happen.

Seriously though, predictions are tricky, especially about the future. It may be worth injecting a tone of a little more uncertainty into your pronouncements about what's going to happen in the future.

Personally I'd have less confidence in the buried gold or the buried dollars than I would about the value of the land you're burying it under.
You know, if I liked hammers, and I didn't do carpentry for the sake of making houses, but just because I liked hammering nails, I might well call myself a hammer carpenter.

Not many carpenters would claim that, but that's because hammers aren't very interesting compared to programming environments.
> Is this useful?

Certainly. (It would be even better if you could get it working with g++.)

> Or are we moving away from C++, ... ?

Yes, I think the heyday of C++ is over.

However, it is also true that the programming world is fragmenting. If someone asks what the "next big language" is going to be, then I reply that I don't think there is going to be one. And that means that targeting any specific language, be it C++ or something more trendy, is no longer a way to reach the majority of programmers.

But, for goodness sake, don't let that stop you. Post a link to the code!
BlackBerry Tablet OS - PlayBook SDK + Simulator (Mac/PC)
A new simplified GUI by GNOME

http://vimeo.com/13797705
http://www.technomancy.org/google-suggest-venn/#start=X+is+l...