skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Make the assumption ... it seems like a logical conclusion"

For me, that sums up the problem with this kind of thing. Assumptions don't lead to logical conclusions, but "meta-assumptions" which have grown out of your original one. You can't put assumptions in one end of your experiment and get facts out the other, unless you can test your ideas.

Incidentally, I'm not hostile to your idea or the others discussed here. It's fascinating, but (like anything for which we can't acquire proof) my own belief is that it's not very useful.
You're "broadly correct" in the sense that the Republican Party is "broadly libertarian."

I spent 5 years writing almost 100% C and C++ in college, with detours into Lisp, Java, VB, and Ada. (Actually, I'd grown up on Basic, so VB wasn't a detour, really.) After school, I worked at a VB shop, but built a few side-projects in C++. I've had to fix things that were broken, and I don't have a problem with the linker or debugger semantics. I've used templates, and both has-a and is-a object extension. I am certainly not an world-class expert in it, but it's not like I tried it once, got burned, and decided I hated it.

I'm a web developer because I like web development better. For a variety of reasons, not the least of them the challenge of building code that is so portable it will run on 12 different browser/os combinations, and the opportunity to work in many different languages, I find front-end development much more rewarding.

My aversion to C is based on a simple rule of thumb:

(usefulness of a feature) / (tokens required to implement it)

Lines of code is a pretty good fill-in for "tokens", but I had to change the rule when someone pointed out that a 500 character regex in Perl is hardly an elegant or maintainable program :)

Another way to express this is that the elegance of a solution is the number of tokens that are not essential to the solution and do not aid in understanding the intent of the code. For example, compare Javascript's closures with Lisp's or Erlang's syntax. On the other side, compare any of those with the mess of class and object boilerplate in C++ or Java or PHP.

Conceptual cruft is even more pervasive. If encapsulation requires class/object constructs, then there is no way to get past that.

Some programmers will be able to create more elegant solutions than others, of course. But without changing languages, you can't get past the cruft that is built into language. (Or, in the case of C, the cruft that was not removed from the language.)

Again, "power" does not mean "you can do anything with it." C can be used to tell a computer to do anything that computer can do. But I'd argue that that's a naive view of the power of a programming language. There are things that are trivial to express in other languages, and require several lines to do in C. Just something as simple as comparing that two strings hold the same value requires about half as much conceptual overhead in almost any other language.

Or is there a version C with lexical closures, first-order functions and strings, and a garbage collector that I'm not familiar with?

I'm not sure what you mean by You don't have the scaffolding around you to provide a fallback for changes.

The claim that C programming takes more knowledge up front than web work does is frankly presumptuous and a bit misguided. I've seen the Javascript that C experts write. It's terrible. In fact, I'd argue that since quality web work requires an understanding of semantic HTML, CSS, Javascript, maybe some Flash and/or Canvas chops, and probably at least one kind of server-side language like PHP or Java, it requires much more knowledge up front than almost anything else out there.
Why Fly When You Can Float?
You still haven't thought about what his words meant.

You said you were facing a certain problem "now", 2 months after the child was born.

You could have made your decision about how to handle it prior to the child being born. If you'd done that, you would not be facing the problem now, it would be decided. But you didn't.

He asked about why you didn't decide in advance. You got offended by the implication that you hadn't decided in advance. That was something you said yourself, so it's unreasonable to be offended by it, or to blame him for noticing you said it.
Unfortunately, this industry isn't very scaleable: how many children should one overseer watch, and still provide quality childcare? 2-7, IMHO, depending on the age of the children...
Luca Cardelli: Bad Engineering Properties of Object Oriented Languages
Do you have any kids? Do you realize how unpredictable it is to plan things for your child, for example, how sick the child is going to be, or how well-tempered?
I'm really disappointed with this article. It slams 'organic' farming and says that those methods lead to lower yields but it fails to explain why or cite any sources. Seems like journalistic troll.

Coversely, I hope we can have a good discussion as to how different types of farming effect our ability to produce food. These sites might be a good starting point:

http://www.sarep.ucdavis.edu/Concept.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sustainable_agriculture
http://attra.ncat.org/
My post is simply about logic and who said what. Nothing more. Why can't you read it rationally?

And, BTW, if you and other parents can't read it rationally, why should I believe you handle parenting matters rationally? Parenting matters are more difficult and more emotional than reading a simple forum post.
This starts with the basic assumption that god is only a useful model and not an actuality.
Collective Knowledge Systems: Where the Social Web meets the Semantic
Rejecting one definition (after a half-hearted explication) doesn't solve anything except by ignoring further inquiry.

But replace the loaded term "God" with something else, say "Nature" or "Infinite" or "Universe" or even "Matter", and I can't see how one doesn't tumble back to a more humble position.

Well, obviously I believe in "nature" and "universe" and "matter". But praying to these things is silly, because they don't have minds and can't hear you.

That's not what "God" means. What "God" means, to the majority of english speakers at least, is some form of magical super-fairy who created the universe and loves you. And no, I don't believe in magic or super-fairies, and I am not convinced that the universe's has a creator, and if it does, I'm further not convinced that said creator would necessarily be loving, or even have emotions as you and I conceive them.

The slippery definition is a common tactic. You can't just redefine the term until it's something we all agree on, and then pretend that you're still talking about the same thing that we were disagreeing with. Either God is a magical ghost, or it's nature. If it's nature, then let's stop pretending that this is about deities and theism, and admit that we're just using poetic terms to talk about physics, declare that praying accomplishes no more than any other kind of meditative activity, and stop treating "religion" as any more special than sports or soap operas.

I'd be ok with that.
Win95 c'mon, lets help this guy with other cooler ways to getting attention and being "different".
In preindustrial societies, children don't spend every moment with their parents. They roam around the village, and the adults and older children collectively keep an eye on them.

The problem now is, there's no village. The older children are segregated in separate schools, and most of the adults are at work. Daycare is, in effect, the closest substitute we've been able to invent for a village on this axis. It may not be the final answer. Which is why lisper's comment is so funny; it's not a problem society has even solved, let alone individuals.
Ah...that's a more difficult problem than your original post made it seem. I can see how you'd be upset by the response, since you know the details of the situation.

For what it's worth, I don't think he was questioning your commitment to your children, so much as the forethought you put into the process. He just didn't do it in a diplomatic way.
yeah go with EC2 first... get users... and more users... until EC2 doesn't cut it... then turn the virtual machines into dedicated servers somewhere. Truth is you'd have to spend tens of thousands of dollars to get the reliability amazon should be selling you for much less.
i meant that some singularitists seem more reliogious about it that scientific.

i have no real opinion whether it will happen or not.
good article, and Meebo seems reasonable on how they try to get talent, BUT, they are using C/C++ for server side development. Of course they are going have to have hard time finding decent talent for it, it is their choice of technology that is limiting them.

http://www.meebo.com/jobs/server/
The Win95 Viruses are extinct already ;)
If the time you save from ignoring an expensive 10% of your customers lets you grow your total market by 12%, you're into profit.
"ICANN said Thursday that new, unspecified security measures should prevent such attacks in the future."

(if (member domain *ICANN-domains*)
(error 'security-error)
(really-transfer domain))
short version: ideas are not unique, so make something good enough that people are willing to pay for.

the end.
Am I completely misunderstanding this or is that guy seriously calculating returns without accounting for dividends?
Think Before You Voicemail
Ask YC: Where to find great freelance designers?
Hi there. Hoping you guys might help. We've created an app for the creative industries but we're really struggling to find a good freelance designer who can produce good quality work. We've tried eLance and a couple of other sites but the quality we're getting isn't good. There must be a secret hidden site somewhere (slightly joking) where these guys all hang out!! Any suggestions greatly received
What could Open Office do with a business model?
Plus ça change (The more things change...)
Here is the rational answer you seem to want. (a) This problem is so hard you can probably never solve it satisfactorily, and (b) you can't know what it's going to be like to have kids before you have them, or what your kids will be like. So however much thought you expend on the question before having kids, you're still going to be working on it afterward.
"And how can one avoid coming across as a know-it-all when talking with folks who are ignorant of science?"

I don't see any way that science is incompatible with god. If science shows that something is false (eg. the age of the earth) then it is false. Science cannot disprove the existence of god by the very nature of what god is (outside of this reality). Science can show a need for a god or a multiverse, but it can't prove or disprove it.

You make it sound like people who learn about science automatically abandon a belief in the supernatural. There is some comfort to be had in believing that this physical world is the extent of reality, but that doesn't make it true.
It's just another mind trick, enveloping the whole universe in something that we now understand (discret computer simulations).

Anyway, reality is an opinion, so any model is a valid model.
Maybe try crowdsourcing a design from http://99designs.com/
as a side note why do I have to click through two pages of ads to see the 2nd page of the article? (I didn't hit 'print article' because I figured it was another click to see the whole page anyways)

These msm companies online (forbes, NYT, et. al) really have not figured it out yet.
I think extensions could be a great way of extending an existing business, indirectly. Let's say you make an extension that works with your site to let your users create some custom themes for it, really powerful stuff that you couldn't integrate into your own site because it's way too heavy. Then once all the theme is designed they can upload it to your site and use it. I'm thinking such a fun feature indirectly helps your business by giving your fans something to chew on and actually making something productive that can benefit your other users. (You'd perhaps have to review the designs and approve them before one can be shared with others because you don't want a theme that obscures important messages and such).
I have three children. While I don't condone the "home bubble", I do strongly believe children need to be raised by their parents and not some daycare center. I have seen parents dropping kids off for 8-12 hours a day just to chase more money. Hell, we tried it ourselves. But guess what? You spend the money you have. If you can't make do with little, a little more isn't going to make a big difference.

Also, the kids being raised by strangers have behavior problems, not because they aren't socialized, but because there is a fundamental breakdown in the family structure.

We could debate this all day, but it probably isn't relevant for most here and no one way works for everyone.
completely agree. you can make progress quickly and cheaply, and start learning about the customers and technology, by outsourcing. in my view, it will be nice to have a scaling or slow code problem--for many web apps, that proves that there is demand and its worth investing more time an d$.

using a rented coder has worked in the past--digg was started with help from elance.

http://digg.com/programming/Digg_com_created_for_only_200_00

elance, guru, and odesk offer cheap options to start small.
> T: <some description involving unverifiable supernatural beings>

Just to argue the point, how do you define supernatural? Where do you draw the line between natural-yet-incomprehensible-phenomena and that-which-is-only-imagination?
Maybe HN needs to change its name to Hacker Advices.
"To count oneself as an atheist one need not claim to have a proof that no gods exist. One need merely think that the evidence on the god question is in about the same state as the evidence on the werewolf question." -- John McCarthy

I used to think that it is just as arrogant to be an atheist as it is to be religious. Both sides have no proof. I considered myself to be agnostic as all we can confidently say is that "we don't know".

But I changed my label on reading jmc's words.

[edit: on reading other parts of this discussion, I see that jmc has already been quoted. However I'll let this post be, as it is still a reply to the parent.]
Lightweight UI Toolkit for JavaME
You Wouldn't Know A Walled Garden If It Bit You In The...
Lithuania Weathers Cyber Attack, Braces for Round 2
were there not atheists long before evolutionary theory?
Tricky, since most of these apps which can run in IE6 but not IE7 do bad things in JavaScript too. That means you can't just fix CSS issues in a proxy, because even if you could document every IE6 bug and how to fix it for IE7, the page could still change after it is loaded in the browser.
It's not really accurate to compare starting a startup to playing the lottery. There is a lot of luck involved, but it's not all luck. People who have certain qualities (e.g. determination, intelligence) do much better than those who don't. So for people who have those qualities, taking a shot at a startup will on average be a net win over the default plan of working for income.

It's also a bit dramatic to suggest that working on a startup = giving up your entire life. The hackers I've met who are working on startups generally seem happier than those who aren't. See for yourself:

http://paulmckellar.com/albums/42-Evan-Williams
Of course life is completely deterministic and predictable given the current information we have.
I didn't argue with that, or ask for an answer of that type, or say that davidw did anything wrong other than misread lisper's post.

I thought the waterfall development link basically answered the question about advanced planning. I'm mostly interested in the emotional fragility of parents and wanted to see what would happen if I pointed out that logic does not back up his reaction.
Thanks for this. I don't feel comfortable with that to be honest - I think this site is good (and there's another similar) but I don't like the idea that there's only one winner and other people put work/effort into it only to not get paid. I will know, from a previous portfolio, who is the right person and someone who we can work with together
This is witty, but incorrect. Not every program needs a database; think about web browsers or games. So if you are writing the physics backend for a new game, you can still be a "good programmer" without knowing what relational algebra is.

Databases are a weird beast; people are wayyyy too religious about them. I guess that's what happens when a technology bills itself as the solution to every problem.
Education has followed an industrial/factory model for many decades, with few exceptions. The founds of Google went through one of the exceptions: Montessori.

We need to update education, and a tech company is the right place to start. A simple example: build a natural language query system to allow a child to get any question answered immediately. May as well call it 411-GOOG 2.0

These issues are very much related to how google makes money today.
When I was a kid, this is exactly how our (northeast Philly) neighborhood was. I never thought about it but I guess a lot of the older kids just didn't go to school.
Celebrate your victories ;-)
Google Sold Us Out: The Viacom Decision
Oh, come on. His question was obviously in response to your statements about what happens to your careers, not about whether or not you had thought about your daughter's future.

It's not like the career question is unforeseeable. Many people put off having kids due to that exact issue.
You can be offended all you like, but if you really didn't have a solid answer to that question before you had your child, I do think you were being irresponsible.
DreamHomeslk-Sri Lanka Real Estate
Sri Lanka Real Estate listings available for Sale Rent or Lease.Advertising Property details is free of charge.
Top Torrent Sites Ranked by Google
Avoid PHP trap
"I'm mostly interested in the emotional fragility of parents and wanted to see what would happen if I pointed out that logic does not back up his reaction."

= trolling
"and wanted to see what would happen"

So you didn't really care what people had to say, you were just trying to bait them? i.e. you were being a troll on purpose?
Because it's such a huge surprise that having children will affect one or both of the parent's careers.
Few, because they didn't have an answer to the problem of design.

(Plus, back then, science and industry had yet to give a stunning demonstration of the power of human reason over nature.)
Did you consider whether I would enjoy your post, prior to posting it?

I wanted to learn something. Why did you post?
I disagree with you on this point. Atheists make the claim that there is definitively no god, just as theists make the claim that there is one definitively.
The form of my post was to make correct, logical points. That is not trolling. The fact I had an honorable motivation -- learning -- does not suddenly make my posts worse.
http://www.godlessgeeks.com/LINKS/Dragon.htm
To point out that you are a troll. Wasn't that evident in my posting?
The iphone has solved this problem for me - at least for incoming messages. I would like a transcription too.

As these tools become more common, it will become easier to receive the information. That means Arrington is essentially wrong: you can continue to use voicemail and people will be more likely to get the message as time goes on. That isn't 'dead'. 'Comatose' might have been a better choice of words.
Ack, what a terrible typo I've made. I intended to state that "Atheism is the idea that we know there is NO higher power."

This is why you should not comment before your first coffee of the day.
Hi davidw,

Here in Slovakia, the most common way to solve it is that mother will stay at home for two or three years (it is also called "mother's vacation"), and then resume her career. I think that in most cases, this is the most sane option. Some mothers would stay at home for 6 years - but even in this scenario, it doesn't mean the abandonment of the career, does it? Can't she return to work after a few years and resume where she left?

I believe the first years of a child are most magical for the parents to watch...and those moments will not return: if your wife will miss them by being in the workplace, they just will be missed forever. So take care and enjoy being with your kid as often as you can afford!
This article reminds me of my father. He still uses what we call "lefebvre books" to do his business's payroll by pen. When I was younger, I thought he was an idiot. Eventually he rationalized it to me for long enough that I thought it was charming and really interesting that his business is like a snapshot of how things were run in the past.

Right now, his company grew to more than 20 employees and he's selling it because his tools and methods don't work in his changing environment and he refuses to adapt to new tools.

Don't get me wrong, he's by no means unhappy, but his business is no longer running at it's full potential. I think a comparison can be drawn here. I believe that your output is a function of your methods AND tools.. I don't care who you are, you can't build facebook in DOS.

If your environment is changing and you still want to excel in that environment, I believe that you have to adapt.
How does doing that benefit you? What's the reason to do it?
I think this is a commentary on the recent court case/settlement involving Mark Zuckerberg and a few fellow students from Harvard.
Unless I was hiring a telemarketer, using this technique would get an instant "wow, this person is a looney" from me.

You're so desperate for connections that you google people in your area and cold-call them? Sorry, that's just anti-social.
Arrogant? No, it is just another 'get shit done' post.
Absolutely. If they are not very careful with precisely this type of issue, it will become "the nomenklatura vs. the proles", and result in the leadership being insulated from what happens at the edges of the organisation - which would ensure the end of profitable innovation at Google.

This is an issue faced by all "unequal" social structures, including countries, tribes, corporations, governments, and others, and every human structure throughout history has required mechanisms for managing it. Google is not exempt.
actually, the body doesn't change much, but medical practice changes a lot over a few years. Treatments and standards of care change pretty frequently, so you do need to keep up (if you are practicing)

There are required continuing medical education credits to maintain your licensure. And board certification expires in 10 years, so you need to re-take the licesnsing tests every 10 years besides doing regular education every 2 years.
The real WTF is that the ICANN thinks domain names have anything to do with security. If you want your users to know your site is you, you need a certificate that your users trust. Anyone upstream from the user can poison DNS caches.
All people I know who label themself atheist accept they might be wrong. I don't think atheists exist that claim to know with absolute certainty that no god could possibly exist.

In fact, I'm pretty sure not a single person reading HN is an atheist by your definition. Even Richard Dawkins is an agnostic by your definition. I can only conclude that your definition does't make sense.

Challenge: find me an atheist who fits your definition.

You'll find none.
I've had the same experience with Audible, who make it easy to sign up but not easy to stop auto-renewal. To cancel, I had to email and they replied asking for my billing address 'for security'. They then proceeded to argue with me, telling me that their policy existed because they "like the interaction with the customers". I on the other hand did not enjoy the interaction with them.

To me it looks like the companies are getting an extra payment in before a customer manages to cancel (weekends, out of hours, remembering to), and increasing the costs of their customer support.