skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
These "heroic professions" also share another common characteristic: they can do no wrong.

Doctors? They self-regulate the size of labor supply in their fields, inflating their salaries. Why do you think we have a doctor shortage? You really think there aren't enough smart people to do the job? No, the AMA controls the number of med school graduates each year by limiting the number of accredited medical schools. They also lobby governments to legislate that nurses can't perform medical procedures (all towards the not-so-discrete goal of preserving their six-figure salaries).

Teachers? They can't be fired thanks to tenure policies. This was the biggest issue with public schooling when I grew up, and [continues to be](http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/16/nyregion/16rubber.html?_r=...). Survive three years and you have job security for life. If my workplace hired and fired based on seniority, we would have gone bankrupt years ago.

Firefighters and policemen also can do no wrong--aside from amazing pensions they have great job security and the power to help those they know more than others in the event of disaster (e.g. Katrina).

For every example of those in the "heroic professions" doing the right thing, you have the same careerism and self-preservation that those in private industry strive for. But in many people's eyes, they can do no wrong.
If you are obsessed by creole cooking and have some old books as part of your web content, sure. I cant see them making up more than a small proportion of a great creole cooking site though, you need new content, commentary and so on too. Cook all the recipes in the old books and add pictures and descriptions...
these products (as other pointed out) exist for year. they have been sold to use with overhead projectors.

i ones has this old tech-hippie show me one and telling me: with this device you can actually watch television together!
(he put the frame in between our faces with it showing some picture, and he smiled -- i saw the picture AND his smile)
I got into programming because of some code maintenance I did for a hobby project. After dabbling with it at uni I'd rejected programming because I just couldn't picture myself doing the 'boring janitorial' bits.

Turns out it is kind of fun to do, particularly if the programmer who went before you was kind of bad, because then there is this puzzle solving aspect to it, of figuring out:

(a) what it is that the code actually does

(b) what it is that the bad programmer intended it to do

(c) how to reconcile (a) with (b)

On the other hand, doing maintenance work professionally is terrible, because most clients put you in this catch-22 situation:

(1) the code is running in prod (with various kludges and workarounds to get around the broken bits)

(2) because of #1 they don't actually want you to make any changes because they might break the system

(3) any fix involves change

(4) hence you cannot fix anything without the client freaking out, even though you are specifically hired to fix things

Maintenance work in that kind of scenario sucks big time.

Disclaimer: I can actually design code properly, so unlike the author my green-fields projects don't turn into unmitigated disasters.
I went to school in Oregon. Things I remember:

* Three or four really great teachers, who taught me a lot.

* Lots of teachers blathering on about personal and rather inappropriate stuff. In retrospect, many seem emotionally desperate and treated the classroom as a captive audience to their personal drama.

* Being singled out and harassed by at least four teachers.

* The school administrator plucking a brand new IBM 386sx off the cart that was headed to the desperately underpowered computer lab. He did this so he could run Windows. So he could launch a DOS-based menu system. So he could switch between two DOS-based applications he used.

Fire the administrators first.
the infrastructure is already in place they just have to type some commands. Cost: $0.

[citation needed]
If you seriously believe that show the evidence. You have the geocities archive and the wikipedia dumps. I think you will not find thats where wikipedia was sourced from. For a start most of it was written much more recently than that.
Until now I was working as part of research for term projects, now as a side project. I am sure I can get traction without any investors, until I get some users on it. So it's a side project for both of us, we both have full time jobs. Can you give me some numbers? 70-30 or 80-20 split?
For .com, .net, .org, and .info, I like Fabulous.com. For everything else, namecheap is a good alternative.

HOWEVER, I wouldn't use them or Godaddy for hosting or DNS or anything else. If you're fine with Godaddy as a registrar, use an alternative DNS and hosting service.
With all dues pect (and I think it's clear I respect you) , this is yet another case of taking a non_normative view of economicsl We can not conern ourselves with whether another party is doing better against us, until such time as we are not doing better against our past.

Do I live better than those who preceeded me under thse same circumstances? The answer is, almost without exception, yes. It may be popular to decry how one or another advtantage which is enjoyed by one population is not enjoyed by another. But the question should always be, not "Am I doing better than the Other Guy? But 'Am I doing better than one might expect (given my invariant circumstances)?

To ask more than that does diservice to the entire concept of progress.
Does ruby need enums?
Common Lisp, Clojure and Evolution
I don't see an issue with the way they're running it now. Operating it as a corp would come with its own list of headaches and I'm not sure that's the goal they have in mind. Plus making all investors shareholders doesn't sound like a good idea. Why would you even want that in the first place.
For a predominantly desktop oriented distro like Ubuntu 100% uptime is an unnecessary complexity. Switching kernels without taking the machine down isn't straight forward. A kernel update is the only reason the updater will advise a restart.
"Marketing is like sex, only loosers have to pay for it." - unknown (at least to me)
On fundraising — A misconception
Standardized testing is a far cry from 'standards'. The problem with ST, is that when it's linked to how much money you get to teach with and such, you're forced to Teach the Test.

Think of it like this: You want to be a programmer. You want to be creative. Does it help you more to be taught critical thinking, certain languages, to have your inventiveness supported and nourished...

or to be taught how to move around little pre-created stuff in some flowchart-type IDE.

Because that's what Standardized Testing is. Pick A, B, C or D.
The proper way to solve the first problem is to take one of your two abstract class and push its public methods up into an interface. Hooray! Now you have multiple inheritance again.

This is actually a pretty good pattern for any significant class which you expect to do subclassing on:

Take the class, promote the shared code up into an abstract class, then promote the high level methods up into an interface.

The only real drawback is that you've got to come up with three different names now for the same thing. Please for the love of all that is holy don't do the horrible thing where you shove I on the front of the name to indicate an Interface. Hungarian notation has no place in a proper OO design.

For the closure examples, I can't help but think that it would actually be simpler and cleaner just to have an external class, give it a good name, and then pass whatever info you need in the constructor. Or do chained initialisation (whatever floats your boat).

(Which is where your setters return self, so that you can do this:

x.setName(arg[0]).setFilename(arg[1]).setFlags(arg[2]);

and instead of

public void setName(String name) {
this.name = name;
}

you have

public Foo setName(String name) {
this.name = name;
return this;
}
School choice is far from an unmitigated blessing - it has a very strong tendency to produce 'sink schools' with very poor outcomes, simply because the parents who care congregate around the schools they think are best. Note think - we know how much the statistics are manipulated, classes are taught to the test to significantly undermine league tables - so you end up with state sponsored failure, waste and the dooming of those children who got stuck in the sink schools because there weren't places elsewhere. If you introduce favouring of more local pupils then property prices rise around the more favoured schools, if you introduce selection by ballot people complain it's 'unfair'.

Honestly, I don't think there is a 'perfect system'. But school choice is somewhat illusory when there are limited and largely fixed numbers of places and it honestly has real, significant problems.

(As an outsider looking in, the thing that really shocks me about American schools is the consistent, persistent denigration of teachers and implication that so many are only there because their greedy, too-strong unions are protecting them in spite of incompetence and laziness while demanding outrageous salaries and pensions. I forget which country but there was an interesting example given during our election campaign last year of a country with very high outcomes and yet relatively modest teaching salaries, which was alleged to be significantly due to teaching being accorded very high status and very difficult admission criteria. The upshot of this was competent, respected teachers with pride in their jobs and better outcomes all round.)
From purely an investor's perspective, I believe the more even a split, the more attractive it would be.

However, since you're not seeking funding at this stage, I'd say it is pretty much your own call - between the two of you. Have a frank discussion, try to work out what value you've built so far and what he brings to the table and go from there. I'd say anything, 80-20 / 70-30 is okay, as long as both of you are comfortable with it.

HTH
(including that funny country selector thing - why do I have to do this again? I don't need to do this when I visit apple.com)

This is a really good point - GeoIP is almost guaranteed to be accurate enough to determine country of origin now. We should no longer have to deal with that crap.
As an off-topic, pedantic aside: the Belgian Apple site requires me to select a language every time I visit. They don't store it in a cookie or try to deduce it from the browser locale settings. Just saying your comparison with Apple here is not that relevant.
They don't deserve any credit at all, because people have been complaining about this since literally day 1.

Now admittedly they might have initially gotten drowned out by the screams of a million java developers wailing and gnashing their teeth about having to pay big $ to do everything with the adobe tools (or, alternatively to do everything on the command line, which is a huge pain in the bum when you're having to learn a new toolkit from scratch).

The fact that it has taken them ~6 months to take their fingers out of their ears and stop saying "la la la la la we can't hear you" indicates just how humungously badly messed up RIM is right now.

They don't deserve credit, they deserve a bullet. And the way they are headed the market is going to give them one.
Yes, Fabulous.com too is a good alternative for domain registration.
I like https://www.google.com/a/cpanel/domain/new because they do privacy on whois by default.
Please note that this isn't an over the weekend spur of the moment thing, these are complaints that people have been making loudly for months.

Your company with the one month time to notice and make a response is actually responding 5 times faster than RIM in this instance. Scary eh?
GhostBloggers launched today
My experience is quite similar. I also got to start out as junior maintainer. I got to work on two of THE crappiest pieces of software in house. I learned a lot, rewrote both of them (at least the shitty parts) - one piece by piece, the other in a month of crunch time. And made them into two of least problematic pieces of code in house.

The experience I gained helped my career incredibly. But then something changed - I kept being transfered from one battlefield to another (thats what happens when you're the best for solving crappy situations). That might be fine and dandy, if your solutions stick. But in my situation juniors were doing greenfield work (since they weren't capable of doing maintaining after themselves - which is kinda ironic) and I got to clean up the mess that I could of easily prevented by getting to apply the experience and knowledge I got solving mess day after day. This kind of situation wears you out pretty fast and so I quit.

So if I got asked how to become really good at doing software. Look for work nobody wants to do and say "Bring it on!". Learn to love the crappy work, then toot your horn and demand fair compensation. But be weary of burn out and thus be prepared to bail out when you start hating what you do. This strategy has many good aspects to it: Customers appreciation levels are way higher - since at greenfield level work everybody expects latest and greatest of impeccable quality in contrast when maintaining - any improvement is considered minor miracle. Plus if you get any good at this kind of work, even if you act out a diva now and then, no one will hold it against you :)
Google was the biggest search engine long before it ever advertised itself. Amazon was the biggest online retailer long before it ever advertised itself. Both of them still only do so very sparingly.
In my opinion this applies to the "find a niche" strategy. She found a niche, a particular audience that want a particular service. They are not looking for professional writing, at least most of them (look at the forum, someone mentioned it but the others don't seem to be too much bothered).

Amazon helped her, the Internet too. She blogs, people get attracted with her stories. After that, She releases a book, cheap like $3, people buy. Her blog, Amazon, word of mouth... all of that bring her sales. She makes money.

Find a niche, figure out what your customers want, make the product and profit.
No, you have never seen the Jason Calacanis Reality Distortion Field in action..
"If you're working on a RIM app, I'm asking you: why? I am honestly curious."

Mike Kirkup had promised free Playbooks to devs who got their apps submitted early on. (NB: I don't know if that still applies, that was last year.) So there's a pretty good reason, submit an app, get some free hardware.

The main reason though would be if you were a Flash developer. Playbook looks like an absolute godsend for them, because they can just take their flash app, wrap it as an archive (presumably signing it and zipping it up) and plop it straight into Playbook. I'm not aware of any other mobile platform that runs adobe stuff natively like that.

Of course, all of RIM's developers were Java guys, so you can imagine that the subset of their developer base that were also secretly Adobe fanboys was actually quite small...

Nokia and RIM both seem to be massive train-wrecks in the whole 'looking after your developers' department. Maybe the guys in Waterloo have been taking coaching from Elop or some other major Microsoft shareholder.
> Amazon was the biggest online retailer long before it ever advertised itself

Was it? I really can't remember how I first heard of Amazon, but I do remember some TV ads fairly early in its existence.
Intent shouldn't factor into Google's algorithm as that's a thin line even Google can't accurately toe without getting it very wrong. Just because these links are a by-product of advertising with a website doesn't make them anything but paid links. I didn't look but those links should be no-followed, and if they aren't you'd be crazy to assume those advertisers are gaining nothing (rank) from them.
Flagged for requiring registration.
Coke is the biggest soft drink. Apple is the biggest consumer electronics company. Both advertise like it's the freaking antidote. No need to paint every company with the same brush. Different tasks, different tools.

The "we don't do marketing" thing is both unnecessarily extremist and usually a lie. See Square for a very recent example.
Seems kind of late-stage to be bringing on a "co-founder".

For any new employee (and you don't need to get hung up on the titles), they should generally get an equity grant that is proportional to the value you intend for them to bring to the business.

If you can't grow the business to the next level without this person, they get a stock grant similar to yours. If they are going to implement some "really important stuff" but generally not be involved in the business management they'll get somewhere between "quite a bit" and "a pretty good chunk".

Generally speaking, it's not a good idea to allocate 100% of the stock. You should think up front about what other employees you'll need to hire, what you might have to allocate to investors and so forth and make grants accordingly now.
I am what I am today because (a) I was fortunate to be exposed to a minicomputer in 1971 and (b) I had a great teacher for 10th grade chemistry. The former was a product of a forward-thinking school trustee and the fact that nobody knew what to do it it so they let the kids play. The latter was luck.

Computers are now part of the background, and I worry there's less of the magic needed to create a proper hacker/developer. Luck is still luck.
Sorry but I don't believe this isn't brought up when considering algorithm changes or improvements. If it's not your department it's someones elses (maybe they are ignored or higher up then you?). You mean nobody stands up and says "Hey this will drop our AdSense revenue by X millions if we do this"? It seems a bit reckless to not consider other impacts of algorithm changes when your company is in fact doing all of this to generate a profit.
FCPA Risk Assessments and Current Best Practices
In part I agree with you. Tenure (which here in Spain is different: all public workers that got their job through examination can't be fired!) is a big problem. There are a lot of amazing teachers (I've had a lot in my life, since school through university), but there is a lot of lousy teachers (also had a lot of these) that do nothing and can't be fired. And the ones who love teaching (a few of my friends are math teachers) have to suffer more or less what the article says. Education always takes the blame, regardless of the quality of the teacher. Also, they have an increasing responsibility: parents no longer "educate" children (how to behave well, be quite, listen, be respective), it is something that now school teachers and HS teachers have to do, without any level of help from a lot of parents. A simple example, is that when a child gets some kind of "fine" (bad grade, a written note to her parents, whatever), most parents blame the teacher and don't believe "their little child" misbehaved.
The bad press is just some people going into hysterics at some scenario that might possibly happen at some distant point in the future.

Which is refreshing in a way, because usually when people are being that hysterical and illogical it is over Apple. Nice to see some other company getting that treatment for a change.

"Is this actually a meaningful revenue source?"

Obviously not. 0 x N = 0 after all. They will however try to make it up in volume (normally a bad joke, but in this case it makes sense). They are massively behind Google's and "the company which must not be named"'s app stores... how then will they come to market with a credible number of apps?

I think the switch to Flash is by RIM a vote of no confidence in their current developers, and I think they were hoping that a big bunch of Flash developers would jump on the band wagon. It might work, who knows. Flash developers have basically no other ways of monetising their work (other than page views of course) so it might seem like a good deal to them. RIM might have looked at their piddly number of apps available for sale for the blackberry and decided that their Java developers just weren't up to snuff.

Of course there are or were systematic issues with app world (basically not available for a very long time outside of the US, the carrier will often not install the app world app, or will delete it before selling the blackberries to the customers, even if you know of its existence it is hard to find etc.)

Also, if the Java developers suck so much, why has Google's app store got so many apps?
I have to say, I really loved reading this article. It spent just the right amount of time on each topic, had good links to back things up, and generally gave what seemed like a great overview for someone who isn't well versed in the field.

Good stuff.
Hard-wiring the fundamentals is also the way Korean go players (go is an oriental board game, you maybe saw it in "A beautiful mind", "Pi" and some other movies, or read about it in Kawabata's "The Master of Go") develop their skills. And they have passed from "amateurs" to dominate the pro levels. Now China and Japan are starting to teach in the same way to their prodigies.
To be fair it was probably heavily vetted/chewed on by the weasels in the legal dept first.
WDE has nothing to do with malicious users and malware. You really do want a lot of things. There are a myriad of threats. For the threat of "car window cinderblocked and laptop bag stolen out of back seat", what you want is WDE.
ClearDB releases new clients for Ruby, Javascript and C#
Yes! WDE only makes sense for single-user systems (ie, most systems). Yes! WDE does nothing about malicious software. You are correct on both counts.
It adds coroutines to Python. What more do you need? It runs every other Python package, it tracks new Python releases perfectly, which means its "significant new features" are identical to Python's significant new features.

What would an "active" version of the project look like?
the emphasis in the original comment was on bangs out a patch with his knees using morse code not on the fact he was dying.

and yes "I am not dying so have to spend my time at work" is a lame excuse in relation.
Reading RIM's reply:
"I want you to know that we are absolutely listening.",
"Our development teams here at RIM have been working hard to get our tools ready for PlayBook launch." ...

I can't help myself thinking of a saying: Losers always whine about their best. Winners go home and fuck the prom queen.
Yes, but there is a reason (believe it or not) that they gather personal information. The whole notary thing was news to me, but it was the one part of the debacle that actually makes good sense.

The blackberry eco-system is to a certain extent based on trust. But the trust is backed by accountability. Every piece of code that runs has to be signed by RIM† using your personal signing key. That way if somebody writes an app that does something bad, they know exactly who is to blame.

It is kind of the opposite of Apple's walled garden approach, but it achieves the same goal - that end users can trust the software from dodgy third party devs like you and me. In Apple's case it is because they 'carefully' cough vet the apps. In RIM's case it is because they will come down on you like a ton of bricks (wrapped in legal weasels) if you do anything dodgy.

†This applies even for you writing and testing code on your own device. You have to send the code to RIM who sign it and munge it up with their 7 secret herbs and spices and then they send you back a binary file that is what you actually install.
This is what it's like for an innocent man to spend thirty years in jail
Indeed, my hat is .. in the basement, for this guy.