skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I am so glad I don't have to use C++ any more. I spent years in video games perfecting my programming skills in C++. What a waste of time. Now I'm in python I feel like I can program again.

Don't get my wrong. C++ obviously has it's place but I'm glad I'm in a different place right now.
all the comments were from people who just wanted to point out that the article was not interesting to them.

That was the impulse for this suggestion of mine: I was trying to think of a system that acknowledges the existence of these dissenters without encouraging them to occupy too much space on the comments page.
Please, if you want to disagree, disagree with what I've said, not with an arbitrary strawman.
Well, that's not really a fair criticism of Forbes, in this case.

Yes, Forbes "misses the point" of the "4-day workweek" as preached by 37-signals... but there's a good reason for that: they weren't talking about that version of the 4-day workweek.

The Forbes article clearly refers to a 4-day-workweek scheme instituted by Chrysler, not 37-signals - and their analysis of why it's a load of bollocks is pretty much spot on. Forbes hasn't missed the point - Chrysler has.. assuming they were even aware of the existence of that point in the first place, which I doubt.

Here we have a case of two things called by the same terms but referring to very different initiatives.

Ironically, I think 37-signals missed the point that the article wasn't about them!
Cory Doctorow's Cambridge Business Lecture
"...a site aimed at developers that launched last night."

I first read this as, "It's for people who launched their software the night before." Interesting choice of demographic.
Mirror test shows magpies are self aware
I'm not sure from your posts, but it seems that you're implying only smart phones have texting capabilities? If this is true, your definition of smartphone is very different than mine. If I'm wrong, I apologize for misinterpreting your statements.

In every group there are always outliers, and I see this in some cases with techies who for some reason or another simply REFUSE to acknowledge that their cellphone is anything more than a $20/mo voice communicator. You can't really solve for those situations.

Amongst all the people I've known/worked with, SMS-enabled cell phones and monthly service packages are the norm. Building an app or service on top of the premise that people can easily and cheaply send and receive SMS messages is not, to me, all that grand of an assumption.

My solution above also somewhat applies to your situation, as you would be the potential SMS recipient from someone with an app-enabled phone. Also assuming that the SMS messages is of the "I'm running late" variety, which would be most common for business meetings and social gatherings, the 20c surcharge would not seem to be something that adds up to a ridiculous monthly accrual. As a proportion of the cost (as in cost of a normal social gathering where timeliness is of some value), or value (as in the potential value of a business meeting), I think 20c is less than a rounding error.
4 rings + VM intro + leave a message + call VM + listen to message > selecting a recipient and typing "I'm late" into a text message field.

If you don't use text messages, fine. But they definitely have their legitimate uses.
What strawman? I was addressing your own words, specifically 'Why would I need a second survey? I already distrust the conclusion.'

You do indeed seem to be reacting based on a prejudice against the conclusion of the first survey, without having any other data to back you up. As I said, if you have any other evidence to support your point of view, you have never presented it. Of course, if you do have other evidence to bring to the table, I for one would be fascinated to see it. As far as I'm aware, every recent measure of customer satisfaction with Apple that has been reported in the press shows them well in advance of the competition. The latest survey quoted by Gruber just confirms previous surveys done by many different organisations.

Do you have any evidence to contradict these findings?
Oh I'm not saying your suggestion is a bad idea. Not at all.. The placebo idea is actually kinda clever. :)

But I think in general it's better just to be mindful that different people have different interests. I'm glad that I'm exposed to a broad range of topics on this site, even if I don't find all of it interesting.

Although, that said.. the obvious link bait type articles "Top 10 ways to blah blah" are pretty annoying. :P
Limelight: dynamic web applications that sparkle with simplicity
One of the other things that I think HN has going for it is that pg seems to pay active attention to the site and wants to cultivate it to a particular end.

Yes, I agree that this is the secret advantage [1] of the site: It's being gardened, using hoes and rakes built out of Lisp.

[1] Well, okay, technically it's a secret only in the Purloined Letter sense.
> For those Mac users who think BBEdit is better than Textmate, it’s usually because BBEdit is a Cocoa application, and TextMate is a Unix application.

False. TextMate is a Cocoa app and BBEdit is Carbon.
I think the 60's discovered a few.
You can't argue with 37signals being able to produce a lot of results with their 4 day work week. . .

BUT does anyone else see the irony of them always posting blog posts responding to Hacker News stories? I thought with the 4 day work week everyone spent less time distracted and more time doing?

I think working from home/allowing any hours as long as results are produced is great for some jobs like hacking and design - but it utterly fails for other jobs. If you need to communicate with other businesses, you have to be there everyday during business hours. What happens if a big customer calls on friday and everyone is gone, 40 hours doesn't help much if it isn't on those days.
Not necessarily. If YC can get its founders to develop a good proto in 10 weeks, why not set an equivalent time frame with your co-founder?
Thanks! Woke up to see that. Pretty awesome! I totally got lucky.

Already got over 100 members and 4,000 uniques. Anyone have any ideas how to keep it going/improve it?
That still leaves you with a .rm file. Also, my method works on .rm streams that don't offer you a download option like MIT does.
Python (et al) people have a different mindset to many traditional languages. If you're into Java then you (probably - the people who develop Java itself certainly do) think it's important that a language be self-hosting. Python and Tcl people think that doing the heavy lifting in C (ie. another language) is perfectly normal. The schism between "scripting" and compiled languages is a false one.
so why do we keep booking ourselves to the brink?
Too specific -> I don't want to got to n sites for n different specialties.
Hmm, actually the 37Signals story appeared earlier than I posted this :-) So they're not really responding to HNews...
In Germany parents can decide - when they are around. For young people on their own - there are rules.
Something like that sounds like a good idea, and sorry for my overly brief dismissal of the post that started this discussion.

I actually didn't mean to say the story shouldn't be listed at all. It just seemed unscientific (and borderline inappropriate) and below the usual standards for the site.
If the article is "about them" in the minds of enough people, then it is effectively about them. In a way, they agree, it's just that the Forbes article is harping on the negatives of not getting it. The 37signals article is talking about what happens when you do get it.
Those who ignore history are condemned to relive it.

More importantly, in your case, those who think the classics are a waste of time are cretins.
I thought with the 4 day work week everyone spent less time distracted and more time doing?

Do you really think that the 37signals strategy of fostering a dialogue with HN readers is a distraction from their business plan? Given that the customer base for products like Basecamp consists of small businesspeople with a slight technical bent?

37signals, like Spolsky and the ArsDigita of yore and (ahem) YCombinator, fosters discussions about hacking because such discussions are a very effective marketing tool. Which is not to say that the company doesn't also do it because it's fun, and because it's good for their profession and for the world. It's one of those win-win-win situations.
Semantics of Success
How about a sliding minimum age - one that gets raised as you get older?
This is cool. Except:

1) Why have a separate search field for 'city' and a pull down for geography? I didn't even see the geography pull down the first time I visited.

2) Signing in to search the site is kind of lame. This encourages people to create an incomplete profile just to try things out. Which leads to ....

3) They don't force you to fill in a complete set of data. This is not the end of the world, but as someone looking for a co-founder, I would most likely skip over incomplete profiles. Perhaps this consequence could be explained as the user fills out their profile.

Edit: First impressions are not great, but now that I've logged into the site, I'm impressed. I still think their questions could benefit from a bit of lateral thinking.

Instead of listing job skills, why not have the user answer more personal questions (like, 'why are you a software animal'? or 'What have you built that you are really proud of?') A list of skills does not provide enough insight.
Forget MAMP. Install Vmware Fusion and run your server environment of choice in a local virtual machine.
Explicitness
I agree... I just wish Python's performance was closer to C++s. I use Python everyday for data analysis, etc... but I'm pretty much stuck with C++ for numerical simulations. Hopefully, the gap will become manageably small sometime soon.
I would allow the original poster to put up a notice that they've found someone/are looking through applicants, etc. Some people will be deluges with messages, and just need some time to hit pause to get through all the responses.

This way, you don't have people posting and not getting a response from the original poster who's moved on. Maybe implement a button the OP could click that shows up red next to the title on the main page, to let people know. Those posts slowly lose importance over time, and if the original poster doesn't end up meeting anyone that fits, they can hit the button again and the post becomes active again.

*Edit: it would also have the advantage of removing irrelevant data. Once a site becomes popular, information overload is a problem. So if you knew someone was already chatting with someone, you wouldn't get frustrated looking through all the posts.
HN will go where the majority drives it.

I hope not... I believe, perhaps foolishly, that pg will take measures to ensure that this doesn't happen.
I think lots of internal software at big companies would benefit tremendously if you gave employees the opportunity to "vote with their wallets," or, for that matter, with their feet.

If big companies were sane, they'd use a little free-market competition with internal software projects and have 2 or 3 competitors for each piece of internal software. Projects would be paid in proportion to the number of users who actually used the software.

To prevent collusion and ensure true competition, just mandate that each team use a different programming language. The "language wars" phenomenon will ensure that the teams are rivals.

This also means, to ensure interoperability and internal control, that big companies would have to create internal infrastructure and well defined standards.
Could they have come up with a worse name than "C++0x" ?
How Newsrooms Throw Away Value By Not Linking To Sources On The Web
What does it do? A little explanation please.
I've thought about this. How do you transfer files between the host and the guest? Do you develop in OS X, transfer the files and then run them? If yes, isn't this a little time-consuming?
You have your head in the sand. I have been on both sides of a crash, my brothers best friend lost his fiancée after she was hit by a drunk driver and a guy I grew up with killed 2 people drinking and driving about a month ago - he saw a cop and was worried about getting pulled over so he sped away and hit two people walking down the road. One was over 21, one under, either way they were still dumb enough to drink and drive. When I was under 21 I didn't drink and drive, and now that I'm over 21 I don't do it.
I'm not sure why I would ever dick around with C++ lambdas when I could instead just write in C and a "real" high level language, like Python, Lisp, or Ruby.
Sorry if I was unclear. I was comparing Dell support with AppleCare, which you also pay quite a bit for.
Web2py: Another promising open source Python Web Framework
I just came across another web framework for Python - Web2py. Looks pretty promising. He even had a reddit-type web2py app running on Google App Engine and that caught my interest. Other than the standard MVC stuff, Web2py also has a web-based admin interface, several free apps available, centralized authentication system. very nice...
Because we're impatient, because it's often the only way to get a step or two ahead -- ahead of what, I'm not sure; ahead-of-average maybe -- and because our society demands it.

Five or so years ago (can't remember now) I was couch surfing at a friend's. Now I've got my own little consulting business. I'm pretty proud of that, but I'm also pretty exhausted now.
Wow. This got posted to HN 20 minutes after the original Forbes story. Impressive

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=281512
I found this list a little contrived. These tools are not ALL essential, are they?

No mention of source control, either. Yikes.
I wonder if it would be possible for downvotes to count, not against karma, but only for an individually calculated gravity? This way, you could accelerate the fall of links you don't like, but only for yourself.
What's wrong with the comment view on that site? Several articles say there are N comments yet clicking on the N comments link almost always takes me to a page with <N comments. Often the page is blank except for the original post?

There is also a ton of wasted whitespace in the middle of the screen on those pages.
Gartner: Cloud Computing Is Highly Disruptive
Philosophy (as I see it) is about asking big questions before science has a good answer. It's not about tackling questions as much as it is about posing questions and testing possible answers with logic before experiments or empirical evidence are available. Saying it has something to do with language parsing really sounds like a misguided generalization from some discussions.

For an example nearer to a hacker's heart, take the "brain-in-a-vat" concept:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain_in_a_vat

While science can't simulate this (well) for someone we can ask quite yet, I believe there's value in thinking about the implications of a fully simulated reality. This discussion was more or less started in the 1600's before we had any sort of technology that could remotely get us near to this. We still can't explore it yet, but it's a valid question and it's an important discussion on subjective reality.

I think it's very healthy and productive for people to ask and explore deeper questions about reality. To pretend that you can't study things without experiments is taking the scientific method. True, experimental evidence is required (in my mind and for most educated folks in our era) to confirm or disprove even the most well-founded theories. Still, there is a very abundant space of theories that are nearly impossible to prove. I feel there's value in discussing them, building conceptual models, and reasoning about them before science is ready.
You don’t need 1 blog: you need 3.
At this last RailsConf we were introduced to the concept of the 4-day workweek by DHH, and the audience snickered. Many of us are working small companies and startups. The 4-day workweek is definitely a luxury I never could enjoy during my times in small startups.

Not only that, but a little bird inside 37s told me that the true 4-day work week works for only a few people at 37s while a few other people put in long, hard hours getting a lot of the tedious work of maintaining a body of software done.

If they keep playing at this, DHH is going to exemplify a new icon of the Pointy Haired Boss. The thing that's most frustrating about that is that DHH is actually pretty good at what he does (meaning framework capture), and if he focused more he'd be a lot better and we'd see a lot more good features out of products of 37s.
Steve Jobs vows iPhone app crash fix for September
So, the article is 37signals missing the point about Forbes not actually missing the point of Chrysler missing the point of the 4-day workweek?
MobileMe: Supplemental 60-day extension eligibility and details
Wasn't hating TC just making a comment on the quick turnaround
Like a dating site for hackers? Just when I had gotten my hopes up...
You could definitely use a screen shot or two on the homepage.
Usually when I try to read a philosophical text, I find it very unsatisfying. The philosophers are just not rigorous, effectively invalidating all their own thoughts.

Yeah, I agree with most of your points. I feel this is a little more true of modern philosophers I read-- there is less rigor than is warranted. I don't feel it invalidates the important parts (to me), which are the questions raised by their arguments/discussion.

Why does it matter what value one's life has? The lecture doesn't seem to give an answer.

This lecture aside, (as I mentioned), I personally feel the value in philosophy is in the questions it raises and areas it explores, not specifically in any answers it provides. I also want those answers, but I don't look to philosophers to provide them. Sometimes they offer conceptual models that do help in scenarios where science isn't giving me a better one, but their "answers" are more like "suggestions" that may later give way to formal theories and empirical experiments once science catches up.

They are just WAY too shortsighted.

I think philosophers, as a whole, aren't short-sighted. I've always believed that the best philosophers explore different "assumption trees" in their quest for earnest questions. Certain assumptions have to be made in order to discuss much of anything at all in philosophy (e.g. we exist, etc) so some of the short-sightedness symptoms you sense might just be hidden in the assumptions of that particular discussion.
Weight as Main Measure of Health May Be Misguided
Motorola Inside Blame Game
It's amazing how poorly Motorola has been run int the last few years.
Your comments seem to indicate you have an axe to grind about lisp, but there is not much evidence that lisp programmers (or old programmers) are any better or worse than other kinds of programmers in building products people want or starting companies that survive.

Perhaps you should shorten your meme to "be cautious of programmers" or just "be cautious".
Bloomberg Offers Windmill Power Plan for NYC
Just about all of the text editors on the Mac that are oriented towards web development have support for automatic sftp/ftp/scp of files to a server, so use that route. The virtualization tools also support sharing folders/directories with OS X, so you could use that path but since the eventual goal is deployment to another server using the sftp option means that going from testing to deployment consists of changing the name of the server you are pushing to.
Just curious: it seems JustHackIt was posted first here on HN and later on on TC? So how come they write about it, as I thought they were rather strict about only writing about "first hand news"?
DHH Interview: Ruby on Rails, Startups, Culture
Is it just me, or does it look like a couple of these features (Automatic type deduction, Lambda expressions) seem to be borrowed from c#? And similar things are in languages like Ruby and Python.

I'm not saying that's a bad thing (or the reverse), and not saying that c# invented these ideas: I'm fairly sure that the c# designers only let in features that have already been road-tested in other, more experimental languages.

Just interesting which was around the ideas are flowing.
Here's one screencast on some of the technology:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FjGKLYINGsg
"C++" isn't a particularly great name itself, apparently they wanted to continue the tradition
The Other Darwin
This sort of setup is great for working out server configuration kinks during development. To do it right, you need an editor with remote file support and a way to interact with a remote process.

Lisp development in Emacs supports this setup.

http://bc.tech.coop/blog/051227.html
I'm game.
American Airlines kicks off in-flight Internet service
TSA inspectors damage 9 aircraft while conducting "security checks"
What are they doing touching airplanes?
CPU Rings, Privilege, and Protection
I like it. It could be the equivalent of those fake traffic light buttons. Even if it doesn't have any direct effect on a submission, it could give "doesn't belong" people an outlet for their frustration, without cluttering the comments.

The problem is that there can't be any universal consensus on what stories belong on News.YC. I've posted "doesn't belong" comments to some stories, while simultaneously being annoyed by the same type of comment for other stories. This inconsistency will never go away.
You've struck a chord: there is a problem to be solved.

But your solution is imperfect.

This is the ideal situation! If your solution was perfect, someone could just copy it as is. But if you need to keep improving it, building it, it becomes harder to copy, and you gain a deeper understanding of the problem (and solution). This is valuable. Any copier-guy is playing catch up - and people usually aren't all that keen on that guy. The danger is if you perfect it! Because then you are standing still, with no where to go, and it's inevitable that others will catch up. The copier guy is now just as good as you (perhaps better on other factors that you don't care about, but some users do...).

The ideal problem is one that can't be solved, like some human need that technology can't actually perfectly address. You then have an endless runway to perfect it. With your headstart, deeper understanding of problem & solutions (and most importantly) all the market benefits of being The Guy (feedback on what works, complaints on what doesn't, statistics on same, more users finding more bugs, and let's not forget encouragement and admiration! Very motivating), you have the best chance of keeping that headstart forever.

Well, that's my analysis of competitive advantage, anyway. :-) But I wonder if you're better off just making something cool that "people want", and not sparing an moment's thought for the competition...
Upvoted for chuckles.
Named Scope: It's Not Just for Conditions, Ya Know?
Fire Eagle ignites geo-aware applications
Did Google rig the Olympics for China?
From what I can tell with recent times, if you make your site collapse repeatedly in a few months, TC will cover it again and you'll get more press coverage. Be sure to have the code working so you can fix the issue by releasing the existing fixes and blammo. You're back on top with lots of press!

Perhaps that's overly cynical.

You're already doing well. Follow your gut and blog the experience as much as you can. This worked well for balsamic.
EBay Needs Desperately to Find Itself
For once I whole-heartedly agree with a 37signals post.
NeverBlock, much faster IO for Ruby
Stuff like "brain in a vat" is exactly why I dismiss most philosophy. Where is the reference to that possibility in the lecture that was posted here? If we (or one of us) is just a brain in a vat, surely it would have a lot of implications for the value of life?

I think "brain in a vat" only makes a stronger case for mathematics. After all, in the end what else but information and it's transformation matters? Everything else can be stripped away. And stuck with pure information, I think we are talking maths.