skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's completely disingenuous to conflate 1) referring to someone by the purpose for which you're interacting with them (e.g. "the barrista who is making me coffee," versus "Suzie, who is working at Starbucks now but is going to really make it big with her one-act four-hour one-woman play") and 2) using generic and insulting terms (e.g. "the telephone repairman," versus "the little shit").

"Resources" may be a terrible, insulting term. But the argument against it also applies to referring to them as "programmers" (which you did in your last sentence) rather than naming them one by one, talking about their favorite IDE and language, and their reasons for working on that particular program.

I notice you also refer to 'vendors' and 'a boss'. There would be a huge amount of wasted verbiage if you told me which vendors, which boss, what the vendor does on weekends, and how much the boss loves to fish. For the purpose of your story, that doesn't matter -- for the purpose of discussing programmers, the extraneous stuff is not important.
fair enough.
i typed up a lengthy post, but it boils down to this: Will Rails be around for a long time?
... until you have them.
I am more stressed out by the prospect of failure than by working a little extra for a little while.
easy implementation too. just redirect to bugmenot
It is a great way to force people...

It's also a great way to find out what's already going on. How could you be expected to extract data points before they even agree with each other?
Mark Cuban: Free is only good if someone else is paying for it
They did drop the price...
The examples you quote are all technologies. What Marc is also predicting is a change in the technology of content distribution.

But what is not gonna go away are content producers. I still prefer watching movies made by Hollywood than home-made videos of cats. Where and how I watch movies may change but the fact that I will still watch professional made movies is not very likely to change.

Similarly newspapers may go away as a content distribution mechanism. But professional reporters and news agencies may not necessarily go away even with bloggers and social news sites and so on.
i don't even necessarily think that it won't be around for a long time.

look at java. it'll be here for a long time to come. and it was very hot for a few years. but now its the cool, safe, standard language CS people pick up. and ruby, for rails, is the new hot language (which was virtually unknown outside of japan for many years until rails hit).

how long till rails cools down and something else picks up steam? how long until the answer to the question "i'm new, what language should i learn?" is something other than "ruby"?

on the flip side of that coin, COBOL programmers get paid a pretty penny nowadays because there are so few of them, but so many COBOL programs are still alive. how long until java programmers become the COBOL programmers of today?

whats "worth" learning depends on what you want to do and whats happening in the industry currently. imo.
How much do looks matter? Freakonomics Quorum.
I might, if I were using the resulting pictures to publicize my iPhone repair website. These guys at least have the skills to put the phone back together again and have a high probability of it working.

Destroying a rare consumer good turns out to be a great way to attract attention. I'm still waiting to hear if the iPhone 3G is more or less blendable than the previous version.
Y Combinator competitor - DreamIt Ventures
If I were you I'd hedge my bets, moving some across now and some across later. I'm also a foreign immigrant living in the US and if I still had a big stash of foreign currency sitting around I'd be looking at buying US dollars right now.

I don't think the current low levels of the US dollar are sustainable. You have to remember that interest rates in the US have been cut to rock bottom, while they remain higher in other countries.

For instance, right now I could borrow money from a bank in the US at about 5% and invest it at over 8% in Australia (and those are just the interest rates that I, the consumer, can get -- I could do even better if I were a hedge fund or something). This is a huge arbitrage opportunity, and I'd be crazy not to take advantage of it... unless of course the US dollar goes back up over the course of my loan and wipes out my profit. The fact that the apparent opportunity exists means that the market is obviously priced on the assumption that the US dollar is going to go back up eventually, and is currently being held down only by the low interest rates.
I gave him one on your behalf. Now if you upmod this comment you will no longer owe me one ;)
4 More Great SEM Tools
OT : Does anyone know specific marketshare numbers about the iPhone vs WinMobile and Symbian? I am having a hard time tracking them down. Jobs claimed iPhone outselling all Windows Mobile combined.
On this list, I've read the following:

Hackers & Painters

The Design of Everyday Things

The Soul of a New Machine

Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who...

The Making of the Atomic Bomb

All were great books, so I should probably add the others to my 'read this' list.
Wow, a Yelp app is kindof a killer app for the iPhone, in my opinion.

Imagine walking into a restaurant and being shown reviews of the place, the drink selection and food recommendations. And being able to filter these by friends? And being prompted to rate your experience as you leave the place?

Wow. Such a simple idea, but such a killer one. Something like this might actually make me actually switch to AT&T. Haha.
I find that the vast experiences and backgrouns of the people going to top schools counteract this point. That's why it's great to work with people from different cultures and backgrounds - everyone brings something new to the table.
I'd probably say the stress contributed to the hours.

If I know there is a lot of pressure on me to finish something by a deadline, I'll end up working more hours to get it done. Not the other way around.
Is functional programming in Ruby not worth the bother?
First I didn't read the linked article but...

I have yet to see a PM that actually performed PM duties that yielded a net positive for a company.

If the PM doesn't have authority over developers the position devolves to a glorified QA position so that they are actually doing something useful.

If they are given authority over developers they add a level of politics and stratification that ends up being a distraction to a team that otherwise works well together. Software developers have a lot of power to affect change and are generally anti-authority. Keeping an organization structure flatter seems to make software developers more productive.

Given the choice I would avoid having a PM and just hire more intelligent software engineers. A quality QA person can give you the same effect without the mess.

Note that I am separating project manager duties away from product manager duties.
"Resource" is never the purpose for which you are interacting with someone. I'd never even dream of calling the barista "The Resource Who is Making Me Coffee."

While it may not be a straightforward leap from "Resource" to "Code Monkey," both labels are born from the same carelessness: a lack of regard for how the person to whom you're referring will perceive your evaluation of their relative worth.

I do agree with you that it can be taken way too far in the name of not hurting feelings. To spend too much time on each person's unique qualities in passing conversation is a time-waster.

We should pick words that acknowledge that such qualities exist. I think "resource" does not, and "programmer" is slightly better.
Side point about the title: When Mark Cuban has a good post, it doesn't need his name to push it along. And when he has a stinker, his name won't save him.
Summary: C code developed with the waterfall methodology, running under VxWorks, all on a 33Mhz PowerPC board. Someone who works in embedded software could clarify this for me, but isn't that a fairly standard setup? Whatever gets the job done, right?

For what I've heard about NASA using Lisp and Forth for some of its software, especially when they had to remotely debug and update the spacecraft, this was a little disappointing.
An interesting fact hidden in the article: the family had to prove that the death was caused by "overwork" in order to get a payout from his employer's insurance.

So I guess it's a concept which exists mostly for legal reasons. The only reason they have it and we don't is that our insurance system doesn't work the same way.
Algorithm to detect the photoshopped Iranian missile launch
If it's not in a contract, it's only out of good faith that they do so. Some shops are willing to give them to you but the price makes it tough.
China's problems sound a lot like those of the US? That's an interesting opinion, but I'd be more inclined to believe you if you backed it up with facts.
Can you explain a little about the problem? It makes sense to me to store everything in the database and scale that. A solution to scaling the database seems to be horizontal partitioning where possible. Is this hard to do?

Am I missing something about why scaling frameworks like rails or django is hard?

On the topic of twitter scaling, I can see the need for heavy database activity here causing scaling issues. Can anyone provide insight into how they solved this if it wasn't something like horizontal partitioning?
I think is this sort of common practice, most contracts will state that the designer gets first dibs on redesign and this is one way they can protect that.

I think this might be more common for flash stuff and the designer keeping the fla and giving the swf away(obviously).

Next time you should clearly state that you want the psd's at the end, but be aware you most likely have to pay more, because the person is giving you the source.
Unequal distribution: iPhones not arriving equally to Argentina, Uruguay, and Paraguay
Well, reading the article, there's hints of a somewhat heavier process. For instance:

A spec is well written when QA can figure out how to test a feature based on the spec.

I'd reply that in an early start-up team, everyone does QA. Again, if they don't, you've failed. Dev silos in a start-up? Are you kidding? If anyone on the product team doesn't know the product well enough to do the QA without being told what to test, you're, once again, completely screwed.

Also:

It came across that it wasn’t important what system was used, but that everyone at every stage of the project must write things down.

Again... if you're having to write everything down to clarify communications, you're pretty shafted. I know why it's important to write everything down. I did work 4 years as a consultant, and in a corporate environment it is important simply because there is a huge potential for miscommunication, and writing things down reduces that potential and also covers your ass.

But in an early stage start-up, both of those tips will kill your start-up much faster than any so-called "wasted time".

Ultimately, all of that advice is good advice under certain circumstances. But not in a start-up. It's a different kind of beast, and I'd wager the author or the speaker lack start-up experience to be making these kinds of statements.
If Wikipedia is to be believed, iPhone is currently fourth place in market share, behind all the OSes you mentioned plus BlackBerry's. But Jobs could well be correct with respect to growth rates.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smartphone#Operating_systems
What I don't understand is why Twitter hasn't been rewritten to be an IM system yet.

Now's your chance. Twitter may never be more vulnerable than they are now.

(Though you might want to consider that it will take you months to catch up to the enormous marketing advantage that Twitter got by building the "wrong" architecture first, using Rails.)

But first, consider this use case: I hear that you belong to a certain IM system, so I go to the system's home page and type in your nickname. I'm presented with an up-to-date paged list of all the IMs you've ever sent, to anyone. I'm also presented with an up-to-date list of your followers (with cute little photos, all of which are up-to-date) and a list of those you follow, and by clicking any of their names I can get a list of all the IMs they have ever sent, to anyone.

I'm not much of an IM user, so maybe I'm just naive... but I don't know of an IM system that does that. Perhaps because this idea is really expensive to scale, so nobody at (e.g.) America Online has ever bothered to try, because it wasn't evident that such a thing would be valuable until the folks at Twitter launched a quick Rails app to try out the idea.
Here's what the output looks like:

http://www.jgc.org/blog/2008/07/photoshopped-iranian-missile...
Nice! Now all I have to do is purchase one from Belgium (I prefer my $20/mo unlimited 3G data plan...)
You know that HTC has had exchange intergation on their phone for quite a few years now, right?

Never used AIM but it would surprise me if wasn't there too.
Done! :-P

Now up-mod me again. Let me know when you've done it, and if we keep this up we might find out whether pg imposed any limit on commenting depth ;-)
Not really. When you have them, that means you have lots of users. Any problem associated with lots of users is a great problem to have.
The Paragraph in Web Typography & Design — Jon Tan 陳
or number of users... truemors did get reasonably popular for a Web 2.0 site
If a person could live forever, I wonder if they would do anything useful with their lives - after all, they could always put it off to tomorrow.

"Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life."

...

"No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new."

Steve Jobs, Stanford Commencement speech
IPv6 and IPSec are orthogonal. Despite persistent myths to the contrary, IPv6 is not encrypted by default.
Microsoft is selling 20 million devices/year with about 100% YOY growth if memory serves.

Apple is at 6 million/year, no YOY numbers yet.

Symbian is selling about 140 million devices/year.

The numbers are not to be directly compared if you care about "smart" part of the "smartphone" - most Symbian users are not using any smart features, whereas many of Microsoft users do and so does practically every single Apple user.
Diary of a Failed Startup: Postmortem
I guess it depends whether the iTunes music store is about selling music or just selling music to ipod owners. Obviously, Apple's priority is the latter (understandably from a business / monopoly point of view). However, if the iPod/iTunes combination didn't feel like such a lock-in (i.e, if the online music store, software and hardware could operate independently), I might easily be persuaded to drink the Apple juice.
In my opinion the problems old media have is that they're tied to existing cost structures - too many employees, too many buildings, machinery,... while new media is busy accumulating all those same things in order to gain credibility, reliability, and scale and to look like real businesses. What's going to happen is that old media will shed those old costs and new media will grow and accumulate new costs until it is no longer possible to tell the difference between them.
beer is liquid bread. My home town has one of the oldest beer factories in Bulgaria and it's also one of the best Bulgarian brands. Although i drink mainly Czech beer, i also enjoy the local one, most Czech beer in the local stores is made in Bulgaria anyway. A lot of friends who have been to america say that your beer sucks. I have never tried any, but there is a reason that there are no American brands selling in Europe(at least non that i know of). A friend of mine shared a nice joke: "American beer is like sex in a canoe, its pretty close to water"
I've done about 10 design projects and handing the PSD was (a) specified in the deal from the outset, and (b) I don't think there would have been a problem getting the PSD even if it wasn't in the "contract". Maybe "You can't have the PSD" is standard for big firms but it hasn't been the norm for small, 1-2 time projects that I've done.
Is Obesity Stigmatizing? [pdf]
What is your take on programming companies that won't give you the source code on projects that you paid for?

A software company that won't turn over the source is going to resell/reuse that code. Your analogy implies that a design firm will reuse/resell the PSD and it's hardly a reusable item.
VxWorks: For when it can't crash...ever. Some of the most entertaining and enlightening projects I have ever worked on were centered around VxWorks.

Interesting interview. I liked the bit at the end about not allowing dynamically allocated memory!
Interactive Exhibits, Touched Echo (crazy)
It would't be hard to copy Alltop or Popurls. And when I say copy, I mean compete. A quality developer could do a better job, I'm sure. A bit like how http://bit.ly has evolved http://tinyurl.com. There's a lot of power in being able to choose which feeds get listed.

- collect stats and create a recommendation engine.

- run a click tracker and have a switch to display only popular links of day/week/month.

- create a plugin or bookmarklet to quicly add a feed to any particular user-created category on the site.

- also combine feeds, something not done on either of the aforementioned sites and then offer RSS. Sponsor ads could be spliced sparsely.

- commenting

Like DMOZ, each new category could be managed by a volunteer who'd be able to place their feed in the category as payback.

Alltop and Popurls are acquisition targets: create a better site now and ride on their popularity.
MIT & Harvard profs with BlackBerry lawsuit lawyers against Affymetrix. MIT in the middle?
One problem is that startups don't usually approach scaling like mature enterprises. Your users should not be your load test.

Twitter has money now. It's time for them to grow up and use a test environment that mirrors their live site, use something like loadrunner, simulate the next level of traffic, and remove bottlenecks before that traffic-level hits their live site.
Cold fusion turned out to be true, from wikipedia

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

"By 1991, 92 groups of researchers from 10 different countries had reported excess heat, tritium, helium4, neutrons or other nuclear effects.[36] Over 3,000 cold fusion papers have been published including about 1,000 in peer-reviewed journals."

"In February 2002, a laboratory within the United States Navy released a report[42][43] that came to the conclusion that the cold fusion phenomenon was in fact real and deserved an official funding source for research.[44] Navy researchers have now published more than 40 papers on cold fusion.[45]"

It is also interesting that there was an effort at suppressing positive results and generation of fraudulent data to discredit the initial findings.

"The late Nobel Laureate Julian Schwinger (1918 - 1994) also stated in 1991 that he had experienced "the pressure for conformity in editor's rejection of submitted papers, based on venomous criticism of anonymous reviewers,"

"In 1991, Dr. Eugene Mallove stated that the negative report issued by the MIT Plasma Fusion Center in 1989, which was highly influential in the controversy, was fraudulent because data was shifted without explanation, obscuring a possible positive excess heat result at MIT."

People often use Cold Fusion as an example of pseudoscience when it is actually an example of suppression of a new idea. The accusations of fraud were widely publicized and remembered but vindication of initial claims is hardly known.
Well, let's ask the people here who work with and know about a lot of startups: how closely is the presence of a project manager associated with success?
He means an abstract "rectangle"... just the dimensions and coordinates.

In JSON:

{
origin: {
x: a,
y: b
},
size: {
width: c,
height: d
}
}
Must See Attractions - Money Saving Tips for Disney World, Florida
Tampa Tribune editor: paper is an add-on to the web site
In the end I don't expect them all to agree... but yeah finding out what they are already feeling and agreeing about is important.

It is also really good to see what they completely disagree about.
It makes sense to me to store everything in the database and scale that... Is this hard to do?

Is Larry Ellison a multibillionaire?

I think it's impossible to explain database scaling and performance tuning in a handful of paragraphs, and I'm certainly not the one to try. If I were to try and tell you exactly what it is about Twitter that makes engineers cry, I'd point out that every single page is dynamic, every user's main page requires a giant JOIN, there are lots of writes coming in all the time from every direction and writes are harder to scale, low latency is a requirement for many people, and there's no obvious axis along which to "partition" Twitter. For example, the PlentyOfFish guy talked about how he could split up his databases based on geography -- it's overwhelmingly likely that people in South Bend, Indiana want to look for dates within fifty miles of South Bend, Indiana, rather than in Spokane. But on Twitter I can follow anyone and anyone can follow me, so the giant JOIN that builds my homepage has to span the entire dataset. And, sure, you can build a cache for every user, but then every user who sends a tweet to 1000 followers triggers the update of one thousand caches, with one thousand internal messages to one thousand event queues... and when one machine full of user caches goes down, what then? It's not acceptable to drop the message on the floor for a subset of users.

Some folks will solve this, but they will be better hackers than I, they will spend a lot of money on hardware, and they will drink a lot of coffee. And it will take time.
Very few options for Ruby or Rails code in this list.

Only http://www.hotscripts.com has Rails resources.

And I can see no sites with Ruby resources.
As a general rule, if you have a choice, I would recommend learning Python (Pylons or Django, I prefer Pylons for it's looser coupling) or Ruby + Rails.

While PHP is used all over the place, if you want to keep your sanity you're better off getting into more...structured systems.

Apart from that, Zend is pretty good. At my last place of employment we went through a bunch of frameworks including Code Igniter, Symfony and Cake. The various members of development all had violent disagreements over all of them. For some reason that I am still unsure about Zend seemed to ... work for us. It was stable, and nobody got into religious arguments over it's implementation. Not sure that's a good sales pitch, but it certainly didn't suck from my view. It added to PHP where it needed to, but didn't require you to learn an entirely different way of doing things. e.g. Lower barrier to entry.
I got one. It's a password manager with built-in online backup. It's not in the store yet - Apple is taking their time approving it. :-(

In the mean time you can try our Windows Mobile or Android versions - these are free for now at our web site http://www.memengo.com

The online backup feature is my pride - you can actually view and edit your backup online (decryption happens in the browser, not on the server), and you don't need a phone to try that out. So in essesne, it can be used as online password manager.