skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This may all be a moral panic, a severe case of the older generation wagging its finger at the young. It was ever thus.

Here we have the modern cultural critic at work: He doesn't just wag his finger -- he deconstructs himself at the same time! So, when I point out that this guy just another in a long line of whining moral scolds, he can claim that he understood that all along! He was just being ironic! Isn't hipster detachment fun -- even when the guy's wrong, he's right!

So, yeah, he's right: This is a steaming pile of Get Off My Lawn. The big clue is the part where he loses focus on the issue of focus (irony!) and starts teeing off on these kids today, who spend all their time on the internet gossiping with each other instead of reading improving books. Even the parodies of this line of argument are older than dirt: Before the Internet it was video games, reality television, cartoons, gangs, pop music, drugs, punk rock, hard rock, progressive rock, Jimi Hendrix, birth control pills, Elvis Presley, beatniks, Buddy Holly, swing dance, movie theaters, the wrong kind of books, jazz clubs, speakeasies, ragtime, billiard parlors, opium dens, all-night poker games, gangs...

Even the interesting part, the bit about distraction, is old news. Distraction is, indeed, one of the modern world's biggest sources of stress, unhappiness and poor productivity, but that is nothing new. This guy accurately notes that concern about information overload dates back to Thoreau's unhappiness with the telegraph and the newspaper -- and I'd bet the Zen Buddhists would be willing to argue it goes back even farther. You're telling me that the Internet is somehow even more pernicious and distracting than leaving the TV on all day, which has been going on for sixty years? That workers in the seventies didn't find wired telephones and intercoms and water coolers and newspapers and muzak distracting? (I guess Demarco and Lister are precogs -- they railed about this stuff in Peopleware before the Web even existed.)

And then, rather than talk about how to ameliorate the information overload problem, the guy throws up his hands and proclaims that we're doomed to a new Dark Age (!). Just as we have been since Thoreau. After all, what important things have happened since 1849?

Being a moral scold is easy work. Each year you write the same essay with a couple of words changed.
Lookery Offers $0.15 CPM Guarantee for Facebook App Developers
Free Hosting for Facebook & OpenSocial Developers
I'm normally a fan of Paul's essays, but this one felt a little forced. Maybe not enough "essayer", too much agenda?
Drizzle - a lighter MySQL
Seaside for the .Net Developer
I'd get much more done if I could work 4+2+1+1 hours scattered throughout the day (say 9pm-1am, 7am-8am, 12pm-2pm, and 3-4pm). 8 straight is brutal and hardly ever all used.
This week; I'd just grab the reddit download and start from there.

If I wanted to do something that was a bit more complex I'd start with Django and use the comments application that comes bundled with as a base for the functionality i actually needed.

But if all you need is a threaded forum you're better off with a hosted solution like http://slinkset.com/

If you're starting from zero, pick up a programming language, and go to it. Make mistakes now so that you can put them behind you.
Reg, glad to see you didn't give up HN too!
Egad.
How does Git compare to the other DVCSs? Aside from a few articles that compare it to one or two others, generally Mercurial, I haven't seen many informed comparisons that aren't a few years old. Git seems to get a lot of buzz because it's involved with Linus and (perhaps as a result) seems to be the hip thing in the Ruby community, but most of the buzz just says, "wow, git is better than Subversion!" for values of better that likely apply to every distributed VC system (e.g., "it lets me commit offline!"). Are there recent, informed, detailed comparisons?

I have been using Monotone for several months, including keeping my home directory under VC and synchronized between my desktop, server, and laptop, and have been quite pleased with it. I like its systems of using hashes as version IDs, and having one SQLite file for the entire database seems like a good idea.

Monotone got a little slow after I added several thousand files, but then I noticed there is a flag to first check against cached inodes (http://monotone.ca/docs/Inodeprints.html#Inodeprints) instead of recalculating the hashes for everything every time. It's apparently disabled to have a default stance of extreme caution, but doesn't seem to pose anymore risk than, say, using a journaling filesystem, and speeds things up dramatically. The few evaluations I've seen of mtn wrote it off as slow, without trying this.

The "algebra of patches" system in Darcs looks interesting, as well. As I understand it: every change has its inverse calculated, so you can apply / undo any combination of patches in the entire history. I haven't used it for more than a few quick experiments, though.
Hire property mgmt and you're the customer. They should do what you want. Get acquired and they're the customer. They'll manage the co as they please.

You may want the co managed to maximize customer satisfaction for long-term stability (ala Craigslist), but a public acquirer will likely manage to maximize quarterly revenue.
So having just one shop is supposed to be better than the option for multiple shops?

I still don't understand why??? I can understand if users want a shop they can trust, which Apple could deliver with their iTunes shop. But how would it hurt users if there were also other shops? The paranoid ones simply would not use those other shops.
It's a tongue-in-cheek reference to how people call the iPhone the Jesus Phone. The main idea = for years mobile phone companies kept churning out iterations on a single UX, and it took Apple starting from scratch and focusing on design first to take the mobile phone to the next level. Why doesn't someone do the same thing with the browser?
This is an absolutely terrible headline. I don't blame the submitter- it was taken directly from the article. The headline implies that Facebook has, in fact, acquired Twitter. They've done no such thing. This is just some armchair analyst making wild speculations with little to no basis in reality. It's tabloid trash for geeks.
San Fransisco Mayor Regains Control of the Network
How Streetread Was Developed (jQuery + Drupal)
Please direct all comments and questions to the post itself. Thanks.
I don't think the decision is as simple as "I run it, or I sell out." Private companies hire CEOs fairly often.

If you could get a professional manager in to help run your company, you would still have control and could fire/replace him. Richard Branson does not run his 250 or so companies simultaneously - he uses professional managers. He pools risk but the firms remain private.

If you sell out, you lose control of your business. That can be a good or a bad thing. (But you can only really get out if you lose control of the business.)

As my dad tells me, "If you sell out, get out." It's wise advice.
Combining JavaScript and CSS for Performance
I think this blog post should be titled differently. While it has interesting info, it barely mentions any details about the tier system that's advertised in the title.
All ideas are very good. I think like I thought about 50% of this ones. Did you feel the same?
Particlularly enterprise software, it's sooooo bad, and its a huuuuge market, but seems nobody dare to make something new, or I'm wrong?
Very good points, thanks for the feedback. I spent a year teaching computer classes for middle school kids, and it really was an eye-opening experience. The basic concepts we take for granted (clicking the mouse button, refining a bad search query) are skills that need to be learned. But once they are, watch out. You add together hormones and Google and these guys are suddenly little Mitnicks hacking their way around all the filters we had in place.
I added some comments in the original post about this one. :)
Ten most overpaid jobs in the U.S.
It's mostly JS-based. Only recently did they re-open a backdoor to allow developers to use server side programming languages with the Google search API.

I feel they have an ethos of being overly controlling. Yahoo! is much more open and helpful. Digg is great too.
A few years ago i read an article that computer games brainwash kids, and that red alert 2 promoted fascism. Its a good strategy, if you want attention predict the end of the world, and stupid people start paying attention to you. The most read news papers are the ones with gossip about celebrities, there is no news here, most people are stupid and use the internet accordingly to their abilities, these are the same people that read yellow press and watch reality TV, its not the technology thats the problem, its the people.
Yet another semi-random list based on a limited research and someone's personal preferences. As virtually any other Top 10 list for that matter.
Google would probably spend a few million building a competitor and would then have to fight tooth and nail for a position in the social news market. I would imagine it's very unlikely they'd make significant progress.

I've read that Yahoo Buzz has quite a few users, but there's still not much "buzz" around it. I didn't even know AOL was in this market.

It would probably be more worthwhile to take a few million dollars outside and have a barbeque with it than to waste it trying to start a social news site. Not to mention they're just going to get a bunch of bad press when they don't completely dominate.

Buying the 800lb gorilla for $200M is a relative bargain. It's going to be seen as a major coup in the acquisition frenzy that's been going on lately and will ensure that when Microsoft gets into this market they'll be nothing but another also-ran. On top of it all they get to take a very high profile customer away from MSN.
Outlet: A PHP ORM
I'm not a libertarian. I'm also a fan of python. Coincidence? ;)
Very nice plugin. Thanks for posting this, and to the developers for making it available. This is a much-needed addition.
I think you can extend this argument beyond hackers to scientists in general.

When you live in a "black and white" world, there's much less need to tolerate gray areas. Ask 100 politicians, writers, or clergypeople a question and get 100 answers. Much less so for us scientists. Sure we debate a little, but in the end 2 plus 2 still equals 4 (most of the time), and it's often easy to see if something works or doesn't.

Libertarianism is probably the most "black and white" of the political ideaologies, so the transfer is pretty natural for us.
Is The Web Video Bubble Bursting?
>> And as anyone who runs their own business can tell you, that requires your complete attention.

I had a shareware business that footed the bills and this was not true in my case. There was a large number of people in the Association of Shareware Professionals trade group that were in a similar position. I'm not sure it's true of web apps either. I had tons of time to develop or twiddle my thumbs.

I had freedom. Security is tougher though, as I did eventually get squashed by Google/MS.
Half of these are just saying that concept X isn't new; so what? 15 amused me, I'm trying to picture my parents using LaTeX. And I'm completely confused by "It's not the best way, though maybe there are no better ways." Nothing better is the definition of best
"Stored Procedures, Views, Triggers, Query Cache, and Prepared Statements are gone for now."

Its fine if they do this but why are they still calling this a database? Its a dumb object store (not that that is a bad thing). The term RDBMS has been misused enough already.
I can't wait for DHH's re-rebuttal on SvN on Friday. :)

If 37s has doubled revenue for the last 4 or 5 years while hiring 2-3 extra people, I'm pretty sure they're not far from walking away whenever they want. Or they could just work 4 days a week and have the company pay for their cooking and Tai Chi classes while still retaining full control. That still sounds like a better deal to me.
Really? What about brlewis's statement: "You may want the co managed to maximize customer satisfaction for long-term stability (ala Craigslist), but a public acquirer will likely manage to maximize quarterly revenue"?
Pro: Works surprisingly well.
Cons: The site has little visual appeal and it wouldn't be bad to have a bit more in the way of "social" features, like the ability to add comments on events.
I guess people at FusionCharts aren't happy. It's hard to be a commercial software tools/libraries company these days.
just musing. this is the internet, remember
These people above Joybubbles and Crunch?

For crying out loud, Shawn Fanning? A hacker in the sense of the word used here?
I don't understand why expansion equals freedom - can you explain your logic?

If they can walk away that easily (i.e. they are replacable), do the founders add value anyway?
zebras are a different species. =) <br/>I agree with you that something that the gender doesn't usually do make things more interesting: "female peacock wins courting championship" or "father bear raising 3 cubs discovered". <br/>But we've had female programmers since the 20's (Jean Bartik et al): if we had 80 years of male cub-rearing bears, 80 years of flashy female peahens, and even 80 years of zebras racing in the Kentucky, should headlines still "celebrate" what is a repeatedly confirmed fact of life?<br/>
Perhaps a better written title could be "Russian programmer Julia Jomantaite wrote tetris in SED" or simply "tetris written in SED". If people don't find SED tetris terribly exciting, why should people be excited suddenly when it's a girl?
I'm no lawyer, nor do I have a dog in this fight at the moment. So I may be overstating my point a bit for theatrical effect. But I'm still not convinced that tinkering with the definition of obvious is going to solve our patent troll problem. So long as it still needs to be litigated, it doesn't matter how obvious a troll's patent is, just as it doesn't matter whether the gun you're being mugged with is loaded or not.

Do you think that I, or anyone else, would have put up with all the pain and the long hours in the lab if we new that Agilent or Biorad could swoop in at any moment and take our markets away from us using their marketing clout?

I'm sure that folks reading this site -- the ones whose products could be cloned by Google or Yahoo at any moment; the ones whose earlier companies were crushed by Microsoft -- have an entire orchestra of tiny violins to play for you.

I used to build multiphoton microscopes for a living. The story of the multiphoton microscope is amusing. Once upon a time, Bio-Rad held the exclusive rights to the original Cornell patent. Their competitor, Zeiss, read the patent and decided to argue that it covered only the use of sub-picosecond laser pulses for microscopy. So Zeiss came out with a competing system intended for use with 1 picosecond pulses. Of course, if you found yourself in the lab late at night and you happened to turn the knob on your laser that shortened the pulses to 80 femtoseconds, your Zeiss microscope presumably continued to work pretty well, but with a big improvement in image brightness and depth. I assume that Zeiss refused to be held responsible for that improvement -- after all, the scope wasn't intentionally designed for short pulses, because that would be Legally Dubious.

Naturally, the whole thing went to court for years. The issue was settled when Zeiss bought out Bio-Rad. See here:

http://listserv.buffalo.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0401&L=conf...

I can't tell you who won or who lost, there, but here's my conclusion: If a company the size of Agilent or Zeiss or Biorad wants to violate your patent, they'll just do it. All you were doing, in those nights in the lab, was trying to improve your negotiating position in the resulting court case.

(That, BTW, was a traditional hardware patent, not the software kind. If yours is a software-only patent... good luck with that.)
I'm not sure the internet is necessarily any "worse" than TV or whatever in this regard, but its threat is more disguised. When you're wasting time with superficial information on the web, you're still using a computer! And there is so much useful information on the web, how could using the web be a bad thing?

On the surface, it appears to be a more productive activity than watching television. It is more interactive, and it does require more skills to get going with it than television does. But once you get past that, it can still all too easily turn into a waste of time.
(erh, sorry I'm new here: could someone kindly point me to info on how to properly format comments? my search skills must be broken today)
how it is working? any clues?
This is a very good point - acquisitions are a messy business.

Can you give us an example - under what circumstances would selling to a private company be a smart move?
This is at least 6 months old, but you won't know that because, frustratingly, there aren't any dates on this page.

Check out Google's Visualization API:
http://code.google.com/apis/visualization/documentation/gall...

Click on the charts tab, you can even use the Google Finance chart.
No it cannot. All rights and freedoms come from property rights. Without property rights there are no other rights.
I am speechless.

Not because of LISP, but because this history preservation effort really deserves all support we can give them. Unfortunately the mailing list and volunteer forms are 404'ed. The contact form works just fine.
...I should add, I don't think that the internet is the problem, nor is television, nor anything else along those lines. The problem, if it exists at all, is with the users of these technologies. The internet can be used for good, useful things, and for wasteful distractions. I think that some distractions can be fine -- some fun diversions here and there is not wrong -- but the users need to realize when they are letting the distractions take up too much time and reverse the trend.
I have to disagree: founders of the most successful and admired companies stick around for long, long time. Neither of Brin, Page, Gates, Moore or Yang think there are more interesting activities than running their companies.

Maybe that's why there aren't many new googles around: entrepreneurs have "more interesting" activities in mind they need to make a quick $5M for.
"David isn't mistaken in saying you should start a company to live off its revenues. The mistake is thinking this is somehow opposed to starting a company and selling it. In fact, for most people the latter is merely the optimal case of the former."

Right, they're not mutually exclusive.

But the old school way of thinking simply says that achieving the former will lead to the latter.

I.e., there is such a thing as trying to sell too early.

Building revenue-less companies to flip may have yielded some spectacular successes in the past (e.g. YouTube), but modeling yourself on rare, black-swan events is not a recipe for success.
"Turns out my nephew is really good with computers, so we're going to give him the job"
In my experience the people who select the text are just professors, either individually or in some kind of committee. Yes, the publishers will send them free copies of textbooks, but that's not exactly a great perk.

There could really be room for a startup publisher to come along and start selling a $30 textbook series, though. It's not that hard to find somebody who can write a textbook of reasonably high quality for, say, first-year physics or chemistry, and if you make enough noise about how overpriced the other textbooks are it shouldn't be too hard to persuade at least some departments to adopt your book.
Airline pilots?

This guy doesn't have a clue. Most airline pilots put in serious hours in butt-fuck nowhere until they reach at least 30, after which, if they're lucky, they get picked up by an airline to get paid something like $40K for the first 5 years until they get seniority.

Just because the cream of the crop get paid well, doesn't mean the entire industry is overpaid.
I'm getting a bit bored by this perceived dichotomy of funded vs. bootstrapped startups. They are simply two different kinds of companies, and they can perfectly well coexist in an industry.

Some startups can be profitable almost from day one, and need very little cash to get there; others need to do experiments for a much longer time, and could end-up having a useful technology but no revenue model. In the latter case it's only natural that someone will come along who could make use of the technology and simply acquire the company instead of spending even more money developing their own solution.

In many cases the companies in the latter group never have any significant chances of making a lot of money, and acquisition is really the only way for the founders to monetize on their work. Similarly, the companies in the former group could simply never grow enough to be interesting for acquisition -- we call them lifestyle businesses.

37signals and Carsonified are great examples of lifestyle businesses; Digg, Twitter, Zemanta, and even Google, are companies which would never happen if they have tried to bootstrap.
So they were wrong about something. By that definition, who isn't "wrong"?

Edit: Since my point seems not to have been obvious, let me make it explicit. Putting a binary label of "right" or "wrong" on the entire work of Freud, Marx, or anybody else is so crude as to be useless.
I've been working on adding some social features beyond just sharing links on Facebook and Friendfeed - hopefully in the next few weeks.
Easy solution? Burn it to a CD and re-import it to iTunes, giving you a MP3 file. I don't think you can play Fairplay-protected files using anything other than iTunes, but you could of course use AppleScript from the AIR client to make iTunes play the file. But that's probably more trouble than it's worth.
Beyond Procedural programming
I've done things in Spring but not the MVC parts. The problem is that configuration is in XML and untyped. So that means your bugs will show up runtime. This, combined with the long make-edit-build-deploy cycles for most Java code severely hampers you. Guice is much better as the injection is being typed and many bugs can be removed early on. On the other hand, you then need to search for a Web framework.
There was a time when television was considered a valuable source of important information about the world. The idea that TV is intrinsically stupid didn't really have popular traction until Newton Minow's "vast wasteland" speech in the 1960s.

I agree that the web is more subtle, especially today, when the chrome has yet to wear off. But no medium is free from time-wasting. History is replete with people whose reading and writing was arguably "a waste of time". It's certainly replete with artists, musicians, and writers whose tendency to focus obsessively on their hobby was bad for their finances and their health. Ramanujan arguably worked himself to death with mathematics.
OSCON 2008: Python in 3 Hours (ppt)
Hey Kp, date range is on the way, working out some bugs, but hopefully by the end of next week.
There is a genre filter, but i need to pair it down, there are WAY too many options.
Lots of other sites do the band search, not sure if I'll add that in, though you aren't the first to mention it.
Well, yeah. Now you're talking like Merlin Mann or the Rescuetime folks -- or, for that matter, a Zen Buddhist. Someone who sees the problem and tries to do something about it instead of merely starting a panic and yelling at some kids.