skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For those who want to know, ACM membership with access to all their journals (digital library) is $198/year. From developing countries, it is less. Choosing Poland as a random example, digital library access is $100/year.
My university's chapter of ACM just puts on silly social events and sponsors talks that are high on marketing and low on tech. Anyone who really cares about the field has given up trying to deal with them and just made their own clubs.

I realize that this is a problem with the local chapter more than ACM as a whole, but the message they've repeatedly given to me is that ACM has nothing of value to offer me.
Probably best career decision I ever made, was in 1999, 1 year into my career, to switch from system administration to programming as my focus.
The situations may be somewhat similar, I think, but the people are completely different. Tim Cook seems to be much more personally driven and quiet, focused on results and numbers whereas Ballmer comes across more as pushy and loud.

This article (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/24/technology/24cook.html?pag...) especially paints Tim Cook in a much kinder, more professional light than I've ever seen Ballmer in!
The whole SaaS model just shifts the sysadmins around to where they are more efficiently utilized. They're not disappearing.
Alleged infringement causes comic to rewrite strip history
1. It's deducted against personal income. 2. Nobody is allowed to do it on their own home
Then you move out and rent from someone who isn't charging above-market rates.

"Mark to mortgage" == vacancy. If you want to successfully speculate on real estate (as any homeowner does, landlord or occupant), you need to be willing to take losses over long periods of time.
Urban density has been increasing markedly in Australia over the past few decades, at least in Sydney. Not quite as fast as some folks would like (ie everybody with a spare quarter acre that they'd rather put up twenty units on) but density is certainly going up.

In my opinion, though, what Australia really needs to do is to develop the infrastructure outside the major cities to persuade people to move out there. Australia can easily accommodate another ten million people, but not if they all want to live in Sydney and Melbourne. Why can't Broome and Mildura and Wagga Wagga have two hundred thousand people?
It's interesting to see all these cloud-based services being used in the real world but I hardly think this is the death knell of systems administration as a profession.

It would take a pretty major shift in attitudes for medium and large companies to start trusting vendors with the kind of data we're talking about here.
Maybe, but I don't think so.

Not many years ago people got paid to, among other things, pick out the appropriate operating system for any given application. Clearly there's not much of a future in that.

These days that same person is responsible for vetting cloud hosting providers, email service providers, and has to be capable of comparing the "old" in-house solutions and bring things inward if there's benefit.

The technology changes, but the role more or less stays the same. The system admin is generally a bridge between business operations and the technology stack, and there's always going to be glue there, particularly for businesses of at least 10 people.

Disclosure: System Admin / Engineer by trade. Weigh my opinions appropriately.
There is no excuse to simply copy someone else's code without some kind of permission, be it a charting tool, be it a CFD library. If the code is under a BSD-ish license, it's fine to use it. If it's GPL-ish, the developer wants me to honor his conditions and, so, that's what I'll do.

Developers should care about freedom, but also for respecting the will of the developers that built their materials.
How about something fun that people can share? Make a free app that lets people make their own ice cream cones by picking flavors for scoops and adding toppings. Or let them make ridiculous banana splits. Let people share them with friends and show them off and get the name out there in the process.
Zenhabits and You
It's also weird in most professions to work long and hard on something, only to give it away for free.

I find that open-source advocates tend to be open-information advocates as well.
But part of being more "efficiently utilized" is improving labor productivity, which all else being equal reduces the demand for sysadmin labor.

Although it might make for a more interesting sysadmin job for those that remain.
I wouldn't consider that a hedge, I would consider it lip-service to the idea of "I might be wrong here." It seems almost completely disconnected from reality.

What do you think would happen at Acme Inc., a company with more than 1000 employees, if one division suddenly demoted/relieved the manager, gave each teammate a gratuitous sick/vacation policy, and rotated frontline employees through the management roles?

I work at a company of over 300 employees, where we implement many of these kinds of ideas: we don't count sick or vacation days, our management hierarchy is extremely flat, and we have no policy about what time people come in to work. Despite that, I think this method of management-via-non-management is not something that every company can try on. It has to be built into the culture from day one. DHH is really only describing the trappings of a fun company culture, not the core of it.

You can't take the outward symbols of that culture and pin them on a company which doesn't approach employee trust and management in the same way.
I don't understand the recent (from the last few years to a decade) intertubes hatred of "weasel words".

Sometimes* they are used to purposefully obfuscate or render a questionable argument virtually* unassailable.

Sometimes* they are used to express a complex reality that is not black and white. Most* real-world issues are shades of grey on top of shades of grey, mixed with some cause-effect loops, and turtles all the way down.
How are these not synonyms?

The difference is time. Judges are impartial, but they are not neutral: the whole point of judge's role is to become non-neutral. By the time a journalist has conducted interviews, done research, assembled their notes, and started writing a story, they should not be neutral either: they should have come to some conclusions about the world that a completely ignorant (read: neutral) reader would not share precisely because they've done research.

Ditto with Godwin's Law - go and look at the Wikipedia entry

You are misrepresenting the article. Read the first sentence: Godwin's law is a humorous observation... That's it. An observation. That is funny. Observations are not normative. Your insistence that they are is a category error.

You have one unattributed example (involving Nazis!)

First of all, the example involves Holocaust deniers, not Nazis. There's actually a pretty spectacular difference between the two: Holocaust deniers, vile that they may be, have generally not killed anyone.

Secondly, if you want a cite, feel free to read http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/18/national/18holocaust.html
So then look for Cheap + Improving.
If someone wishes to circumvent the GPL and thus disrespect the will of the generous developers who made their work available under the sole condition people don't disrespect the rights of users, I have to wonder what are they doing in the software business and whether the software business wouldn't be a better place without them.
I agree to some extent, but wikipedia and similar sites are what A.I. will use to "learn" in the future.

If this were 1990 or I didn't know about wikipedia, then I would be very impressed and think this was true artificial intelligence.
Well, the intention was not to be cavalier, but to try to ignore the risk side of the equation as much as possible, because thats what Trulia did, so the analysis could be comparable. Having read all the subsequent comments regarding risk, I now see that what I should have said is comparing renting to buying on a _cost only_ basis, w/o considering the differences in risk, is not a helpful analysis.

I still stand by the original assertion: buying in SF can be cheaper than renting (see the revised numbers), and the risk and reward there entailed is actually pretty small if: buying now (after a recent fall), getting a 30-yr fixed rate, and sticking around for ~5+ years
I am curious as to what Steve Ballmer is bringing to the table at Microsoft. Somebody should do an article on him to explain what impact he has on the organization.

Based on what is written about Tim Cook in recent article it doesn't sound like Cook and Ballmer have anything in common apart from being in close range of the more famous founders (Bill and SteveJ).
Hard real time systems are probably the primary thing for which Haskell-as-is is directly unsuitable.

Haskell as an EDSL for generating hard real time, however, is very viable: http://corp.galois.com/blog/2010/9/22/copilot-a-dsl-for-moni...
RTFM: Craft Goes into more than Just Beer...
I went in thinking I'd read about Khan's reforestation plans or something, but instead it's just a side effect of stability... Internet, I am disappoint.
>> buying walking distance from the beach gives you that security that land value will never go down

Riiight, global warming is a fraud by those science guys ...
I think it's more that someone at somepoint is just going to have to choose a time and probably by some arbitrary means. Why does it need to be the other person? If you just say "Whatever" it makes it seem like you're disinterested in meeting with the other person and/or indecisive. Worst case is that it makes you look unconfident - they're obviously so much more busy and important than you are that you just want to let them make the decision.

Whenever someone tries to schedule something with me, my response is usually "Sure, why don't we do 2 PM on Tuesday? My schedule is wide open though, so feel free to let me know if there's a more appropriate time." That shows the other person you're interested, flexible, and willing to make a decision.
I find the article to be slightly contradictory. There's certainly a lot of potential in Qwiki. Visual presentation of data is a hard problem to solve and I think Qwiki's current slew of examples many can agree are quite nice. In that case, wouldn't that answer the question of why they need $8M in funding? To solve the problem of meaningful data and produce results more in-tune to their provided sample searches?
As with virtually every headline-as-a-question, no.

Too much existing infrastructure. Too many systems that aren't web-UI apps with cloud backends.

Maybe in ten years, this will be more plausible.
> Only irresponsible ninnies would do that

Incompetent programmers do that too.

> You'll never know about 99.9% of it.

Too bad if it's your job knowing it.
I think the OP is forgetting that what the product does now is largely irrelevant to a good investor. It's what the product can or will do that makes it worth investing in.
I'm an active entrepreneur and I completely agree with the author of the post. While the economics of the last bubble are drastically different than what's going on now, seeing this kind of exuberance for a company that has a flashy but poorly thought through idea reminds me of 1999.
not that hard. It's only got only to be good enough. You are not an investor who has to invest $20M. For a 200K non-repeatable investment for someone willing to do the legwork, yes.

It's like finding a GF. Most people eventually settle on someone. If you start by saying "all the good ones are taken" then you are unlikely to get any where.
Mihai covered it. Here's my rundown:

http://infrequently.org/2011/01/on-the-care-and-feeding-of-s...
No you are still constrained by the limit, super resolution only works with the information that is captured.

The diffraction limit isn't a hard line limit rather the information disappears into noise as you go past the limit. So what SR does is use multiple images to remove the noise for details close to the limit using some neat algorithms. But noise quickly overcomes the information as you push against the limit.
If it's BSD the developer also still wants you to follow the license and abide by it's terms. The BSD still has terms that need to be followed.
The more likely scenario is that you start an open source project. Put it under the BSD. Great. Two years later someone comes and says, remember dev X, Y, and Z. They were using some GPL code in your project. We've found at least 50 instances of it.

Now here's where it gets ugly, because everyone who picked up your project thinking it was a BSD project, just picked up a GPL project. They may be using your code in very intertwined, fully in compliance with the BSD license, but you must now inform them that the must comply with the GPL or cease using this code, or pay damages.

That doesn't seem like a great situation to be in.

Although it is ironically a good argument for the GPL... "sure the license may say MIT/BSD, but it might be GPL"
Generalising enormously, the capital cities are already perched in the best locations. A successful city needs two major things: ready access to water and ready access to trade. That's why most major cities are on rivers or around major harbours.

Take my home town Darwin, for example. It is not destined to be one of the world's great cities because it is poorly positioned. There's buckets of water but due to the flatness of the country it's hard to dam. The harbour is large but shallow. The approaches from East and West are not friendly to bulk shipping.

Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, Brisbane and Perth are already hogging the best spots for large cities.
> If you want the next out-of-left-field success

Most people are quite happy with plain old success; you generally don't need new industries or novel techniques to do that.
People who have equity in their homes don't typically foreclose, and owners in NYC typically still do. Two reasons for that. First, property values in NYC haven't dropped as much as in other areas. Second, co-ops constitute a very large percentage of the purchasable housing in Manhattan (and in some of the outer boroughs as well). Nearly all co-ops subject you to a very invasive board approval process where you need to reveal everything there is to know about your income and assets. They want to know that you're making more than enough money to meet your expenses and that you have sufficient reserves to cover yourself through any period of hardship. Co-ops also usually require a sizable down payment (almost always at least 20%, sometimes even 100%). If you seem risky, you don't get in. So there's definitely less of an opportunity for shenanigans with exotic mortgage products and the like than in other cities.
Anyone else really, really lazy?
Throw away, obviously.

I've been wanting to make this post for a while but not sure the right way to do it.

I made my living playing poker for most of my adult life (im 28), after dropping out of school and working $10/hour jobs for a couple years. Never made a ton of money.. ~25k a year on 10-20 hours a week.

I fell backward into some free lance web work, fast forward a couple years and I am making 70k a year full time in a small town as the stake holder in a $2M revenue/year website.

All through doing free lance work, and now full time (and throughout my entire education) I always always procrastinate until the last minute.

Part of the problem is that I have always been able to put forth 10% effort (or really, 100% effort 10% of the time) on 'assigned' things and get A's or deliver to clients or whatever.

I was fine with this most of my life. But it's got worse and worse, to the point where I just let things slide that I don't really want to do, even though they are important to me that have them done. It's only when it's either a) dire, or b)something I have a desire to do that anything gets done.

I really thought taking a full time job, and being accountable and what not would force me to buckle down. But I've found I can put forth 10% at work, get everything that is expected of me done, and get praised.

Please don't take this as a bragging post for that statement. I am sure lots of people here know what I am talking about. If a decent hacker was my boss they'd see through my BS in a week. I actually am good at what I do, and make things happen for them that is magic as far as anyone in the company can tell.. but I do it while browsing the internet 25 hours a week.. granted a chunk of that is researching the types of things that make me valuable to them.

I guess my question is: WTF? I am in this slump.. I have nothing whatsoever to complain about; but my life is one big game of "tomorrow I will.." and I don't know how to break the cycle.
Don't think so - can you provide an example?
It's not just VCs and alpha-male top gun types. You're correct about your friends, but I think it's more that they've already determined your place in the pecking order. For instance, how many times have you been in a discussion with another programmer that devolved into "My project is so much cooler than yours"?
Agree with randall that it's a good starting point. Matt1 has a pretty cool html5 mockup tool too - http://jmockups.com. Glad to see multiple people in this space.
One technical problem with fuzzy logic, that is not suffered by statistics, is that there's no universally-accepted way of combining fuzzy logic truth values.

The rules for manipulation of conditional probabilities, which statistics inherited from probability theory, allow building up complicated statistical models (i.e., complex enough to capture real-world applications) from pieces. This is what the comment by _delirium is saying.

There's no such calculus for the truth values in fuzzy logic. The core problem is, what the concept of "truth value" refers to. In conventional Statistics, probabilities can be grounded in relative frequencies, and in principle measured in real experiments. The same can't be said of a fuzzy truth value.

That much said, there are some people working on generalizations of probability theory to situations where relative frequencies don't make sense, and there's an overlap between the more sophisticated of the fuzzy logic theorists and this community. See, for example, http://www.sipta.org/isipta11/, or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imprecise_probability
> They forward along the keywords. Useless for identification purposes.

Identification isn't the point. If you think identification is at issue, you don't understand.

> as I think we've both made our points clear.

I can't help but think I failed.
UI/UX tutorial for Engineers please critique
Hi, I'm a UI/UX developer who thinks there is room for a better way to learn UI/UX design and development. There are tons of tutorials out there, but none seem to really get the balance right in terms of explaining what should go on a page, where and why. I also find they don't really explain the method so much as how to literally construct the mockup or code. At the same time, real UI/UX skills don't seem to have made it beyond very few universities. I'm trying to create a series of tutorials that will explain to people the essential principals behind designing web pages to full blown apps.

This is the first in what will be a series of tutorials based around UI/UX design and development that I'm writing now. In this tutorial you construct the wireframe for a basic homepage.

It is temporarily hosted as a google doc since I wanted to get the content done before I started on the fun stuff (the site). The tutorials will be for anyone who already has a basic understanding of HTML/CSS, but will likely be aimed at engineers (I'm trying to write in a really logical style that makes sense to engineering minds).

So, HN, please take a look and let me know your thoughts.
So we've progressed from a small subset of the population as sys admins to ... everyone who wants to deploy an application/service being a sys admin? This seems like a step backwards, in some ways.

I suppose this is a win for people that just want email, or documents, or calendars, but for anything else, you're stuck maintaining your own data in the cloud.
You can have my system admin when you pry him from my cold, dead hands.

Wait, that doesn't sound right.

The points stands, though: I really don't want to do that stuff and he's welcome to it. And I seriously doubt the whole world is going to use someone else's servers... There will always be companies that don't trust 'the cloud'.
CACM was reformed a couple of years ago. In one issue, it became vastly better and it has sustained its quality since that time pretty well. There are always two journal articles with nice introductions for those of us who don't follow their respective fields regularly.

The rest of the articles tend to be pretty solid too; there's very little IT drivel or academic navel-gazing left. It probably doesn't hurt to have some awareness of what's going on in academia even for those of us who work in industry anyway.

Not that any of this really refutes your main point that digital distribution is inherently more personalizable.
I'll expect to see all system admins gone, when CASE tools actually work and all those programmers disappear. Who ends up employing the system admin is up for debate.
It's not a zero sum game. There's no point in keeping around jobs are unnecessary.
How Microsoft plans to market against the iPad
Start small and force yourself to do something you want to do for ten minutes every Monday for a month, then try Monday and Wednesday... I don't really know what else to say. I was in your situation in college and when I graduated and moved to Japan, I found that I just wasn't happy with the kind of person/work ethic I'd developed, so I started forcing myself to work on projects.

It's not easy to kick yourself in the ass, so you just have to keep doing it!

And I'm not saying I never procrastinate, because I do. I think everyone does to some extent, honestly -- so you should chose a simpler, more attainable goal with a positive effect, like "work on X for Y minutes Z days."
The Competition Myth
We all work downstream of these people, potentially as simply as by virtue of typing "sudo gem install ...". See kanjackson's very perceptive comment.
too bad they don't have an alternative in the market to offer right now...
Could you say more about why "getting" monads was needed?

I came to Haskell with no understanding of monads, started writing code, and eventually used my knowledge of Haskell to learn about monads. Not understanding monads just meant I was lacking a useful design pattern, and found certain API docs confusing, but it didn't stop me from writing reasonable code in most circumstances.

On the other hand what you describe in your (awesome) blog post is a more significant Haskell project than any I've worked on, so I'd be interested to hear your experience.

I've not really written my own monad, or properly looked into monad transformer stacks, and I'm aware that I could probably clean up a lot of code using them - is that the sort of thing you mean?
My goal is usually to get the meeting scheduled in as few emails back and forth as possible. Proposing an initial date, time and location gets us there faster.

On the receiving side, I also find that I'm a lot less likely to procrastinate on finding a time that works if you offer specific suggestions. I'll usually check my calendar right then and there and respond. Otherwise, I might stick it on my todo list and forget about it.
PubNub:

"Cloud-Hosted Service for Real-Time Messaging"

"There is no guarantee that all messages published will be received in the same order that they were sent."

... So not really real-time then. Disappointing, since I was already trying to think of ways to use it.
Not a bad idea, but it assumes that you can forecast local markets. And you're still left with mortgage risk.
I seem to recall that this is how Gmail handles attachments.