skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A VC: Three Statistics That Lie
also nameboy.com
I think they were referring to the "brand equity" when they are talking about the logo.
Mobile ad company Admob is about to mint money
The End of Bugs?
SomethingAwful is full of geeks in the archaic meaning.
International Customer Backlash on iPhone Rate Plans
Not really, especially if you used templates.
3 Reasons not to use Apache mod_rewrite
Jgrowl
German company switching 12,000 desktops from PC to Mac
Not really that creepy, and again it's based on content not author. Let's say that blogger was 15 and she blogs mostly about hanging with her friends, music and movies. I'd say you following it would be a bit creepy (as the question always is "why"). Now if that 15 year old was a programmer, hacker or had some sort of insightful ideas than following that blog isn't creepy at all.

As I get older I find that my peers in IT stay younger (please no jokes about high school girls) yet my business peers become older. This will surely hit me even harder when I break the 30 mark.

It seems the brilliance in IT is fueled by the young, and funded by the old.
The process of trying to get hold of the recently expired domains seems even more frustrating than trying to find a new domain in the first place.
Seems to be covered in error messages.
Facebook’s “f8″ conference Agenda
Even if some younger person is not blogging about programming, there could be all sorts of valid reasons fro reading their stuff. Maybe you are working on a product that targets teenagers, or want to know more about your childrens world, or maybe you are just curious how other people spend their time.
bustaname worked great for me
The confession of a finance professional
An amazing disclosure, though the article is in context with Indian market, the logic (reality) is true for rest of the world.

visit: http://www.rediff.com/money/2008/jul/07guest.htm
From Oxford Dictionary: Friend - a person with whom one has a bond of mutual affection, typically one exclusive of sexual or family relations.

Developing mutual affection takes time. Clearly, technology has taken this word 'friend' (and many of it's variants) and has - to use the new parlance - mashed it up. Of course, words and meanings evolve but technology has created social platforms that leave behind words and meanings that were shaped over decades and centuries. There's a dissonance between who we think is a 'friend' and what a social platform thinks is a 'friend'. The context is new, the rules are not well established, and the words are awfully inadequate.

I agree with Mr Gray, btw. It is creepy. But, this is quite normal where technology is busy pushing the boundaries.
This sort of debate (good rugs vs. bad) will only become more complex as we discover and build new drugs. What is now an illicit drug (cocaine, meth, heroin etc.) will look downright silly compared to the new custom tailored get-high drugs that come out of the drug company labs.

All I can say to people who are on both sides of this fight now is to "enjoy it while it lasts". The lines are only now becoming slightly blurred, in 20 years we'll look back on these times with great fondness. When we worried about blunt-instrument fun drugs and could tell the difference between a "steroid user" and a gifted athlete.
They can't, and that's kind of the point. We don't understand the why yet, and are far from discovering the "why not".
Your are correct, I was just drawing a defined line to simplify the conversation (maybe I went too far). However just as in real life we need to understand that interactions with "kids" need to be done with a consideration of their age, motives and expectations. They aren't lab rats we can monitor and mess with without consequence.
The UK has the same climate of fear regarding any interaction between adults and children.
The Letter I'm Overnighting to My Senator About FISA
Yet the VC crowd is dumping money on web apps like Twitter with no revenue.

They do have 2 out of the 3, maybe it's like the ol' "good/cheap/fast, pick any two" thing.
Why do you immediately assume that an aspect of our culture comes from "conditioning" by the "the American media"?

I think the main reason for it is this: for the most part it's difficult to form close friendships with people significantly different from you in age (14 year olds and 28 year olds really don't have that much in common) so people tend to assume that if they're talking too much then there must be something creepy going on... or at least that they just can't find friends their own age.

I'm a "real scientist". Why would I want to talk to a 14-year-old?
I'd describe my upbringing as solidly "Black Middle Class", having roots and connections in both extremes.

As I mentioned, this is all a very subjective discussion, and generalities are generally wrong.
Having said that, the black communities have all the usual cliques: nerd, jock, preppy, musician, etc. and schools which value some cliques over others.

Speaking of an "average" school is as misleading as speaking of an "average" parent (insert the usual joke about half a bra and half a jock strap).

p.s. I think Dr Dre was pointing out that the "poor & urban" niche is not a particularly lucrative one, thus the need to appeal to the mainstream.
More interesting is this "Until now the highest profile switcher has been Auto Warehouse Co. which is in the midst of a switch of 1000 desktops"

That's it?!? And they're not even done, which means the largest installation is now under 1K.

Shows how far the Mac platform has to go in the 9-5 world.
Not with services like www.pool.com, very easy in fact to get one after it drops.
Ask YC: Why do people value digital goods less?
When I was living in first life, you would do some work, the value would be clear, and when finished you would get paid (real cash). That cycle would continue and the wheel went round.

But since I've gone all digital, I notice there are very different culture. No matter if working for someone else or self-employed, this industry has a unique set of rules, this is quite normal, all sectors have their idiosyncrasies, but there is something peculiar to digital goods. They are not valued the same as 'real products'.

Why do you think this is? and how can this be changed?
Artificial DNA can power future nano size PCs.
Pothead Ph.D. - This is most definitely not a cautionary tale
Isn't the problem with Feedburner and RSS feed stats that they count "hits" and not actual subscribers (aka unique visitors). So if my RSS reader asks Feedburner 20 times a day for new content it counts as 20 to the total?

Anyone with info on this want to clarify?
I can't answer your direct question, but if you're trying to infer whether the Chinese video sites are profitable or not, I can say that I've heard they are all losing money at the moment and the general strategy seems to be a war of attrition.
10+ Widget-Badge to ENRICH your Blog-Website
Nice to hear that BDD/TDD is doing well for you. I love RSpec's stories. Unfortunately in a land where using the Spring framework is a big risk (e.g. corporate software development), BDD is not going to be widely adopted, let alone seriously considered. Startups are for those who want to expand their technological comfort zone. Average companies in the other hand, they're fine with remaining average.
I have only successfully used code folding when I write HTML. It's nice to finish a section of the page and close it and forget about it. I never use it for CSS though. I can never remember where that margin or padding is being added from :)

I wish TextMate had proper folding logic for Python.
Heh, I knew from the title that this was going to be about Boing Boing. I'm not sure how that reflects on the article, but I think it's something like "this is not a widespread problem, only some fanbois complaining about a semi-obscure blog."
Wow, an entire article about the benefits of pot and working and no mention from this "Ph.D" about the difference between Indica and Sativa marijuana.

For those too lazy to Google it, Sativa (usually grown outdoors) is great for working (think euphoria, and optimism), Indica (usually indoor) is for relaxing at the end of the day and "zoning out". Think 'body high'

Those FUD commercials you see with the kids deflated on the couch? Indica. The commercials you don't see? Well those would be showing motivated Ph.D students working their ass off after smoking a little Sativa (apparently unaware of the chemistry behind the scenes if this article is any judge).

Lesson for kids: Do your homework (this applies to your hobbies too) If you think just smoking weed will help your studies, at least make sure you're buying the right kind or a hybrid which will give you a little of both.
I feel like a part of it is warranted.

It's great to see people of different age levels be able to talk to each other and have good conversations, all due to the accessibility of the internet. People from across the world could have great interactions that they would not have if not for the internet.

However, the internet also provides anonymity for perverts and pedophiles, giving them the freedom to do whatever they want.

Younger people may be a bit more wary when someone older friends them because of the latter, which an unfortunate truth.
Flash Lite ported to the iPhone
"For that matter, it ain't alcohol, which is far worse for one's body and mind."

Except for that not only is moderate consumption of alcohol good for you, but teetotalism is as bad for your health as being morbidly obese. How is it possible for someone to get a Ph.D. without picking up even a trace of scientific literacy?
Microsoft Signals It Would Rather Talk To An Icahn-Controlled Yahoo
31 is not old age, and I hope when I get to 31 I have 20 year old girl friends :)

However, in the real world it is hard to socialise with people who are not in the same age group as you are for many practical reasons e.g. try going to bars with people who are minors in your group.

Primarily it seems we are indoctrinated by the nature of the societies we live in which seems to teach us it is not good to associate with people much older/younger than you. This seems to be an issue that starts from even the early days of education where the difference is small (in most schools, hanging out with people more than 1 or 2 grades above/below you is often considered weird by the peer groups).

However, online it is more to do with shared interests, ability, and many other factors rather than age. Age does not matter. Cases in point: Who knows the ages of the people we interact with on HN - does it matter? All the startups, in past and present cycles (e.g. soccernet.com, facebook.com) created by very young people - did the users/ buyers/advertisers (most of whom are in different age groups) know or care about this?
I wonder just how fun a corporate, locked-down, Mac will be.
duplicate? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=235658
I'm 35 and a few years ago I dated a 20 year old. Was that creepy? Not at all. I followed the campsite rule.

http://www.thestranger.com/savage/campsiterule
I was trying to ask a question, not make an assumption. Sorry if my phrasing was inept.

I lived in America for five years and I noticed that the fear-mongering was much more pervasive there, compared to Australia, where I grew up, and especially to Holland, where I live now.

I'm a scientist too. I love talking to kids about science. Their enthusiasm rubs off on me. I'm not looking to become friends with them though. Can't we distinguish between interaction and friendship?
Of course they would. Icahn couldn't actually run Yahoo. So if they were negotiating with him they'd be negotiating with someone who didn't have the option of remaining independent.
"How is it possible for someone to get a Ph.D. without picking up even a trace of scientific literacy?"

One word: humanities.
What about for alcoholics? If refraining from something completely is bad, should we all experience LSD/Cocaine/Heroine infrequently?

I would think the real damage of teetotalism would be the stress involved in constantly thinking about and addressing it. Not so much the lack of the substance in the body.
Both Google and the Internet Archive will remove cached content if asked (which I think is terrible but I guess this is their only way to avoid copyright infringement problems).
Cracking the China Code: what works—and doesn't—in the world's most populous market
Every state doesn't have distribution "clubs" where all the varieties are laid out in front of you before purchase and with a sampler or two.
About as fun as a corporate, locked-down PC is.
mac dominates the design/music/film industries though
Listening Post's Top 10 Hottest Music Sites
"I would think the real damage of teetotalism would be the stress involved in constantly thinking about and addressing it."

Then you would be wrong: http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9E05EED9143FF...
Echoing jey, I don't see anything in what you are saying that contradicts pg or Wumi. I think pg was pretty clear that there is a continuum of popularity, and nerds are at one of the extreme points on that scale.

"If you went back in time now, would you not be able to do it better?"

In some ways, probably not. I just wouldn't be as stressed about it. I still really don't have much in common with the people with whom I went to high school, and I still don't think it would be worth sacrificing any of the things I enjoy and that have led me to the life I have now (imperfect as it is) in order to get the kids I went to high school with to like me more.
What is the cost of SMS?
You know, back in the day, it was normal for everyone to have two computers on their desktop. There would be a generic PC running Windows with a 14" monitor for word processing and email, and there would be another machine for "actual work". If you were an engineer, it might be a SPARC or RS/6000 workstation. If you were a designer, probably a Mac or an SGI.

Nowadays you can get one box to do everything, a Mac is a Unix workstation that can run a PC in a VM. Why wouldn't organizations switch?
Any evidence to back this up? I'm a web designer, I know a ton of other designers and they are all either multi-OS capable or fall firstly into the PC camp.

The posers (fresh out of school, concerned about image/style still) usually are using Macs.

/ducks
Yes that does move the old weird-o-meter up a bit.

I think what's missing is a social trust structure and a goal-based relationship. After all, we see these types of relationships everywhere -- Big Brother/Big Sisters, Boy Scouts, Youth Religious Groups, Mentoring relationships in school and college, etc.

But there's always some kind of goal, and some kind of trust structure built by society to protect (or at least try to protect) the innocent. Now with the net we probably have 9-year-olds chatting up 60-year-olds on the virtues of various sex practices. It's out of whack.

I know I was in a chat system a couple of weeks ago in a room that was politics and "R" rated. (Hey -- politics is always R-Rated!) I got a "hey there" IM from a person with a nickname of "April 14, 1939". We started chatting, and it took about 20 minutes for me to figure out it was a 12-year-old using god-knows-who's nickname. (The bad grammar and vocabulary were a hint)

I know I was uncomfortable. I told the kid he should use sites with his own age group. I also chided him on his poor grammar and vocabulary and told him we'd talk some other time (we didn't).

It's weird and it's uncomfortable. I'm not saying it's wrong -- I'm sure there are good things that can come out of these relationships. Kids need role models. Adults usually have been through a lot of the problems that kids are going to face and can help out a lot. But gee -- you get these "ambush" friendship deals...

I think there's a great potential for good here. I also think there is something very wrong going on. I am reminded of the observation made when TV came out -- it used to be there were "adult" conversations and "kid" conversations, ie, conversations were adjusted based on the audience. With TV, everybody was downstairs in the kitchen late at night talking with all the grown-ups: even if we were only 4. The net takes this context-free-communication thorn up to the next level: chatting bi-directional communication.

Yuck.
It doesn't mean the largest installation is under 1,000. It means the largest all at once switch was 1,000 (at least that was publicized, these things aren't always). Switching from one platform to another is pretty rare.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=Xo33_-jvdhI

i made a mockup of the same concept w/ an ajax heartbeat triggering the messages (mootools 1.11 instead of jquery), but never released it. kinda shakin' my head now :)
The Copycat Benefir For Startups
"He'd be monster cool, and still effortlessly ace all exams."

Such people do not exist, given the "effortlessly" part. I think there is a consensus now that "talent" is mostly the end product of a lot of effort. Because outside observers do not see all of the hard work, only the end product, they infer that there must be some "talent" thing that explains why the other person can do things he cannot.

I believe pg made this point, arguing that the reason that nerds do not exert the effort necessary to become popular is that it would detract from the effort they can exert towards the things that are really important to them.
That same anonymity coupled with distance increases safety. The greatest risk is from those who live close to you so the pervert three time zones away is a lower risk than the pervert down the street who you only notice in passing.

What I think is risky is joining local on or off line groups where it's easy to find where you live / work.
Can someone explain to me why designers should use Mac? I can't see any significant differences between Photoshop and Illustrator run in Windows and Mac.
ColorZilla - Firefox plugin for Web Devs
PHP has many good lightweight frameworks that put the fun back into building web apps. CodeIgniter and KohanaPHP are especially lightweight. It isn't much fun coding web apps in raw Ruby, Python or any language.
Writing specs that are incorrect but pass are also bugs. I'm surprised he hasn't run into this situation.
Wish I'd taken a screenshot now.

It was basically a semi-transparent box in the top left of the screen which showed you the query as well as which DB served the data (for me they came from db007, and the friend data from some shards), and two links, one for a popdown box with info about the query, and another with the file trace infomation.

Quite intresting, shame they have removed it.
Right, which means you need to be aware of what you're buying from your dealer and how it effects you. Buying a big ol bag of Indica, sitting down and taking a few bong rips will NOT help you finish the writing essay or give you the inspiration to code your next application masterpiece. Most likely you'll find yourself sitting on the couch watching some crappy MTV reality show too lazy to get up and fetch the remote.

My point: All weed is not created equal, ask your dealer for the kind you want (and if necessary educate him/her)
ordering code is not the same as hiding code. Perfectly fine to throw in some comments to provide hints to readers as to what this section does, but providing hints to the editor and having the editor automatically HIDE the code seems wrong.
"in other words, no. you probably won't become more popular by trying. wearing the right clothes, and doing all sorts of things that the popular kids do will only make you look like a poser. the popular kids don't do those things to be popular, that's just what you see on the surface."

Can't find it right now, but I read a Zen of Cool test where a man is brought into a room full of clothes, and asked which outfit is coolest.

The correct answer: "Whatever I put on."
That's what I'm afraid of. I was hoping people would be less likely to completely hose a Mac and therefore there would be a lower need for draconian restrictions.
shrug

Every design team I've worked with, startup or Fortune 500, has been on Macs. Yes, that's just more anecdotal "evidence" but I've been a consultant in several companies over the last ten years.

One Fortune 100 company I worked at had slowly moved the entire web development team (front end and back end) onto Macs. The front end guys liked Photoshop on the Mac, and the OS level colorsync support, and the higher gamut LCDs (versus your run of the mill Dells - no one was springing for the $5k+ displays). The back end guys liked that they could run the same bash scripts and ant execs on their local machines as would be running on the Solaris production servers. Having a 99% compatible bash shell available out of the box, and having the same path separators makes a big difference.
Android Installer - for Nokia 810
Contrary to popular belief, actually Linux dominates the film industry.

http://www.desktoplinux.com/articles/AT5611327583.html
I have personally had success with using GoDaddy.com's auction system (but using the "buy it now" variation, rather than bidding). I've scooped up several domain names with high pageranks for under $20 each this way. Takes some research, but it's doable.
Some Linux Tips
I immediately assumed the analogy was meant to portray hackers as 'makers', artisans etc. in order to broaden the readers perception of what a hacker was or could be. I was immediately interested in finding out where the author was going to take the idea and was pleasantly surprised. An analogy is used to quickly open up the reader's mind and prepare them to think about something in a new way. Was this one perfect? None are. Did it work? Yes.

This article, on the other hand, is merely one in a long line of internet articles that purposely refuse to get the point of what they are criticizing.

On a personal note. I read H&P while taking breaks from driving on a cross-Canada trip. My original driving partner is a painter. He had to drop out and a hacker friend took his place and brought along the book. I thought it was amusing at the time and told him the title would have been more appropriate before the change.
The title of this post got my hopes WAY up: Code folding? Applying catamorphisms to code? Way cool topic!!!

But no, it was about how one specific language and one specific editor have some hints that play well together to hide and show blocks of code. Which is interesting even if you don't use that editor and that language, because it looks like another form of abstracting away some details.

So for the people who use these Miscrosoft-specific tools, how is the argument against code folding different from the argument against extracting code into its own method? It seems to me that if I take a bunch of code and put it in its own method or class, I can move it out of sight, hiding its ugliness and exposition from view.

Is code folding substantially different?
I've used this tool for a while myself, thought I'd share it: http://dxl.yamm2.com/domeintest.php
but when the code runs to a screen or two a little order helps a lot.

So... all the time? If you're not writing pages of code, you might be leveraging someone else's pages and pages of code.
> there are a lot more hacker/musicians than hacker/painters

This is very true. I have spent a lot of time with visual artists discussing why their field no longer seems to be of general interest.
http://pickydomains.com -> $50 gets you an (almost) endless supply of pretty good domain name suggestions from a large number of experienced domainers. Your $50 is returned if you don't get any suggestions that you select.
The large population studies this article cites aren't exactly convincing. Anyone can perform similar studies showing other correlations. The "feeding studies" are more important to scientific understanding. Also, I would think an individuals personal health profile would outweigh blanket advice like "drink moderately".
Absolutely. I love their statement that they will not negotiate with Yahoo's current board. I interpret that to mean that Steve Ballmer does not like to negotiate with people who say "no" to him.