skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Fire them? Uh...no. Here are my responses to his points:

1) I work 80-100 hours a week, and enjoy it. For the past 7 years. No burnout yet. I find time to exercise and unwind.
2) If you are just throwing hours at the problem, you are not passionate about the problem. Workaholics are (most often) passionate about their work.
3) Those people who feel bad that someone else is working more than them need to get over themselves.
4) Workaholics often "put in their time" in an attempt to retire early. Not a bad judgment call, IMHO.
5) Even workaholics know how to unwind, and do. You can work 80 hours a week and still have days off (168 hours in a week, 112 waking hours).
I think this is incorrect. Before Groupon was Groupon, they were The Point. A company that applied the same social tipping-point approach to consumer and political organizing. Think "if 2,000 people all agree, we'll donate $10 each to the WWF." Or march on city hall. This was powered by a RoR app that Ken Pelletier and a small team built. I'm fairly certain that the early tests of Groupon leveraged this app. If so, the early version of Groupon was powered by tech far more substantial and purpose-built than Wordpress.
I effing love what I do. The result is that I frequently "work" 14+ hour days, skip social stuff to code (or sneak in my iPad to research the problem I'm stuck on), and I love talking shop.

I'm this way in my own business and I was like this at the job I had before I left to start it.

Honestly, with all of the slack ass clock punchers out there that can't write a lick of code, the idea of canning someone for working too hard seems pretty silly.

And FWIW, I found time in the last couple years to get my pilot's certificate.
> This association of corporate life with Java contributes to people's hatred of using Java.

This association happens because the wrong people are defining which technologies will be used. When a manager makes manager-ish decisions, Java is what you get. Or Windows and .NET.

> I bet if corporations started using Python, more and more people would hate Python

Won't happen because

a) Python is actually good
b) The same people who make manager-ish decisions won't pick Python.

> When I actually used Java in one of my first personal projects,

I too had a more optimistic opinion of Java when I started playing with it. But then I remembered how it felt to program with Smalltalk (I learned OOP with it, later played with Actor on Windows). Then I met Python, and Zope and realized web development doesn't need to suck.

The company I work for maintains several Java applications and a couple PHP and Django ones. The difference of productivity from the Java projects and the Django ones is absolutely shocking.
No, the initial process of mining the bitcoins is inflationary. After they are mined, it is deflationary.

If you misunderstood that, then you didn't understand the arguments in the first place.
It's not "I don't know" that's an invalid answer, it's "I don't know, so let's assume <absurd fairy tale> is true."
I like the COBOL red-herring. Java can't be that bad because there's still COBOL! We must fight COBOL...

wait.. that's actually kind of a good idea. Raise your hand if you're a COBOL developer. Any young COBOL developers trying to break into the field?
We're using the HN hotness algorithm with some points boosts to surface older items. For a full explanation of the ranking algorithm check out the API docs:

http://www.hnsearch.com/api
Will Dream Drop Distance Make its Debut at E3?
Indeed. Python is my Blub; it's just so darn easy and it has enough functional capabilities that I haven't yet felt compelled to throw out everything I know and start with Haskell or Clojure.
Well, the point is you need to try to figure it out for yourself before you ask someone else directly for their attention. If someone simply points you to google, you should be able to tell them why that isn't an acceptable response to your question.
haha is happens as well, thats why I wrote that note to experts, cultivate a community and try to learn from others.
This is cool, but the API looks a bit cryptic. Is there a way to simply lookup an item by URL?

Edit:
Nevermind, figured it out:
http://api.thriftdb.com/api.hnsearch.com/items/_search?prett...
This isn't unique to Apple; there have been several studies over the last few years about how certain brands have passed some threshold of triggering the same brain waves as cultists have. I don't have any citations, and for that I apologize, but one show my wife and I watched said a very few have done this. The brands mentioned were, if I remember correctly, Apple, Linux, Nike, Volkswagon, and Coke.
Do you use Chrome? You can list this search engine as a custom search engine in Preferences > Basics > Manage Search Engines...

Add a new search engine -> Hacker News

Keyword -> hn

Url with %s in place of query -> http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=%s

You can do the same thing with a keyword bookmark in Firefox.

I've been searching HN all this time with a custom Google search including "site:news.ycombinator.com". I'll have to see if this is better. Google offers results filtered by date, which is really nice, since technology moves so incredibly fast.
Thanks for the kind words and suggestions!
Impact is nice, but HTML5 still has 3 major issues in my opinion.

1) Sound doesn't work on every platform/browser but this is not impact's fault, it's html5.

2) Performance on android isn't good. It works ok in Opera, but not well the default browser.

3) In-browser multitouch on android is not available yet.
WWDC 2011: It's about complete integration of Apple devices
Supercilious dismissal is not generally the appropriate approach.
HNSearch API Contest
What 2d tools are you referring to?
While folks (particular Jason) are giving you excellent advice, can I take this from another angle? A $20 bill rate does not mean you are getting $20 per hour. Not even close. You have to factor in all the non-billable parts of consulting, like writing proposals, educating these clients that $10/hr providers will likely not lead to project success, and handholding them through the project because they'll likely need lots of it. They're disproportionately likely to be pathological clients because they are attempting to do business in a place which might as well be marketforlemons.com to save a few hundred bucks. It took me years to adjust to this, but it is true: a few hundred bucks is not a lot of money.

Can I strongly suggest you make a small investment in improving your business skills, get clients in the old- or new-fashioned ways without a marketplace site, and laugh in the general direction of a $20 bill rate? Also, don't call yourself a freelance programmer. You solve problems for businesses. Many businesses have problems such that there is no number they will not pay to get them resolved.
I have read an occasional article on modern farming methods -- some for smaller farms, some on large-scale agriculture -- and no matter how much science and careful methodology I previously guess that they use, the articles surprise me anyway.
العاب فلاش 2011 
العاب فلاش 2011 العاب فلاش 2011 العاب فلاش 2011 العاب فلاش 2011 العاب فلاش 2011 العاب فلاش 2011 العاب فلاش 2011 العاب فلاش 2011 العاب فلاش 2011
I think it's just inflammatory link bait, in the same vein as Calacanis' OP. The bottom line is there are many ways to run a business. Personally I would not fire a great person regardless of whether they worked 20 hours or 100 hours a week, but I understand that there may be social dynamics at play that shouldn't be ignored.
LulzSec gets social-engineered, personal data leaked
Keep your eyes on toto games and their upcoming game maker studio. Read their "glog" for updates and video.
Is there any search engine that returns the right results for the term "C++"?
I was actually expecting the whole "shutting down" announcement to be a Lean Startup-esque experiment. If it is, I am really glad, because I'd rather that companies (startups or not) focus on things that people really want.

I can't help but imagine all the good Google could have done if it had done this go Wave (either by pivoting it into a better product, or by leaping the whole team into greener fields sooner).
Why do you think a brilliant European should be allowed to work in America but not a brilliant African?

Or did you simply mean that rich, educated people should be given international mobility while poor, uneducated people should be content to rot where they were born?
I spoke with the CEO of a company that aggregates a very large percentage of the daily deal sites. They have several hundred they currently follow. Two things which may be salient. First, the CEO claimed that the smaller deal sites were all desperate to be aggregated, as building their list has proven to be far more expensive than they expected. Second, the aggregator is seeing a 30% annual turnover in the deal site population. That is, approximately 1/3rd of deal sites go under annually and are replaced by a like number of newly launched companies.

I interpret this as evidence that the lion's share of the market is likely to go to a few large players like Groupon, Living Social, Facebook, etc. It's been 2.5 years since Groupon launched. If smaller players were going to successfully carve up this market, wouldn't we see signs of that happening by now?
that's just not true. There are many stable oligopolies which can either resist, tamp down on, or co-opt new upstarts and maintain a status quo for themselves.

And there are people who have to do the same difficult, time-consuming and demoralizing work acting as gadflies against the egregious abuses of multi-national corporations.

And the notion that Governments don't compete is always either false or double speak. It either is the case that governments compete with the private sector (e.g. government backed plans for health insurance can operate more cost efficiently than the private sector, so they're a problem), or they don't (as you've just claimed).

And there are opportunities where people have successfully competed against governments as well. Governments collect mapping data and you can pay for access to that content. And yet there are tons of mapping companies out in the world, many of whom have better services and capabilities.

Lastly, for people who might wish to claim that government can wield undue influence over free markets when they get involved in industry, nothing has stopped them from getting involved in industries they're not directly involved in. The federal laws banning online poker are a great example.

Industry lobbying is such a powerful and distorting force, again enabled by a lack of transparency, that it seems laughable to be worried about undue government influence.
Maybe it's not surprising that a mainframe programmer completely fails to understand the debate.

His list of four reasons people hate Java completely misses the point. The real reasons people hate Java are something like this:

1. It's verbose, providing lots of unnecessary opportunities to add bugs, and because it's verbose, reading code written in it is slow, so modifying it is slow. These are constant-factor problems, though, not order-of-growth problems.

2. It's early-bound in some important ways, so you're faced with a constant dilemma between adding even more verbosity, making the code harder to modify, and losing flexibility, making the code harder to modify.

3. Although it's quite CPU-efficient, it's very wasteful of memory. (You'd think a COBOL programmer would appreciate this.)

4. The tooling around the language imposes enormous overhead. The JVM takes a second-plus to start; Eclipse uses hundreds of megabytes of memory, if you can get it to work at all; you usually want to run your servlet container behind a reverse proxy; building and deploying a .war file is just orders of magnitude more pain than hitting "reload" after you update your PHP script.

There's another missing-the-point viewpoint shift here, too. This guy seems to think that the point of programming is to enable big businesses to continue to function, like bookkeeping, factory machinery maintenance, and executive team retreats at fancy hotels. Well, programming does do that. But it's also a medium of expression, and a competitive advantage for companies doing new things.

Bookkeeping relies on arithmetic, and factory machinery maintenance relies on paint, but that doesn't mean that Erdos and Picasso were "fighting the wrong battle" because they failed to apply their talents to helping out poor GM.
Jason Calacanis' follow-up response to this adds more nuance to his previous statements:

> Truth be told, I’ve never asked anyone to work harder
> than I do, and I work seven days a week.

It's good to know that he doesn't ask anyone to work eight days a week.
Keep in mind that IRC is no exception to the Fuckwad Theory:

Normal person + Anonymity + Audience = Total Fuckwad
It is not Apple's problem.
Or, by "id"? I looked, but I wasn't able to figure out, for example, how I'd get pg's top-level comment here from the id "2619846". I was able to find it with this search, but it requires a second-part to the "_id" that I don't know where to find: http://api.thriftdb.com/api.hnsearch.com/items/_search?q=... (Trying to filter for "id" instead of "_id" throws an error, for some reason.)
Lets see :

1. Wiretaps
2. Taping Telecoms
3. Taping satellites

and yet that still does not educate the FBI, CIA, NSA into having better computer specialists? That is the disadvantage of relying upon political back deals to do real work in that you get an illusion rather than reality.

Note, US military for years has been advocating taking service men and women and retraining them for a counter
computer security role to replace the independent whitehats.

Would it be too much to assume that the profits might be great enough at risk that some whitehats might be involved
with this LulzSec effort?
That's not the kind of safety we're talking about.
Data Centers (the buildings)- The Next Wave of IT Innovation
We just changed the contest date from June 15th to June 20th to give people more time to work on apps.
http://mixergy.com/andrew-mason-groupon-interview/

Search: "WordPress Blog"
Wow, that site looks great (content-wise). Good job.
>Note, US military for years has been advocating taking service men and women and retraining them for a counter computer security role to replace the independent whitehats.

That is already an MOS.
The search box should be on the top
Definitely! I'm actually trying to get in touch with the SearchYC folks. Recently they put up a link to HNSearch which was very nice of them.
I will answer this from an employers perspective. I myself have managed teams of developers, and have also hired individual developers off free lance sites. (as well as graphic designers and writers).

To most employers, the actual rate you charge is not that important. The basic reason is that we view our time as the most valuable constraint on a project.
That is, we are far more likely to pay more, if it assures us that it is going to save us time in the long run.

Time can be taken up by having to re-do a project, poor communication, misunderstood requirements, etc etc.

The most important thing you can do (as many below have said), is to read the job description I have posted, and provide a customized proposal to it. I am not asking for a detailed in depth proposal, but I would like to see that you have put in say 20 minutes or so of work on it.

The comment here, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2619472 is also applicable. My description of the job is likely not going to be exhaustively complete. Ask me one or two questions about the job.

Better yet, if i've missed a very important part of the description, ask the question, but then make an assumption and say, "if I assume this is the task, then I would do y, and my timeline would be x"

Also, use bullets in your reply to me, I'm going to be scanning a ton of applicants, and bullet points help me quickly read through your application.

Hope that helps.
<a> That won't help my XY is W and V. What can I do?
*b has changed the channel topic to: Don't ask questions.
I'm not sure if you've done this in the past, but would you mind explaining how to get clients in the "old - or new-fashioned ways without a marketplace site"?
given this: http://www.macrumors.com/2011/06/03/itunes-leaks-automatic-d...

app updating without syncing seems to be a go.
We have amateur radio (pirate or registered), AX25, APRS mail, USB-stick sneaker-net, UUCP, modems, dialups, OTP encrypted SMS still. It's low bandwidth but important information is actually really small.

IPv4/6 may die but there are still ways of shifting stuff around that is important.
Apple doesn't seem to fight jailbreakers at all. It seems that most jailbreaks rely on a security hole, and Apple has a responsibility to patch said hole.

Back in iOS 2(?), for example, you could jailbreak your phone by visiting a webpage that automatically executed code on your device. That's SO shady, and I'm SO glad they fixed it.

If Apple actively wanted to stop users doing this, I'd imagine they'd have very little trouble given they have full control over the hardware and software stack.
Jason is an expert at leveraging hyperbole to a) get attention and b) initiate constructive dialogue. I respect him for his ability to do both.

But sometimes I feel what he writes needs to have a disclaimer at the top that says, "This is what worked for me in my very unique business. It may be disastrous in yours."

Basically, I view Jason as a conversation starter, not someone whose advice I'm necessarily going to follow. And having talked to him a few times at cons I've gotten the feeling that's really what he wants.
When does InnoDB compress and decompress pages in Facebook?
It's because this post is part of a meme: someone wrote a post with precisely this list of 10 one liners in some language (Scala, I think) and then several others have written translations to other languages.
Any economics experts around? What would hypothetically happen if all countries lifted all immigration laws and allowed people to come and go wherever they liked?
It's not about being quantifiably better - it's about perception. Security is wholly percieved. It doesn't actually exist.
I'd like to find an apartment this way too, but I'm skeptical as to how well they handle bicycling in concert with San Francisco's crazy hills.

At least having the topo map would be nice. :S

(P.S. other than that, AWESOME).
To who ever runs it: 'Yeserday' is spelled wrong. :)
The `_id` attribute for each item is its submission id plus a signature. ThriftDB references objects by their unique `_id` attributes.

The `id` attribute on the other hand is an item's submission id. It's not indexed though so you can't do lookup by id.
He did correct his mistakes, though. In modern terms, this would be the equivalent of publishing something without the mistakes, because there is no time or materials cost associated with correcting misspellings. When Asimov wrote this letter, though, it would have cost him a sheet of paper to type the letter without mistakes, and he apparently did not find that a worthwhile investment.

Note also that none of his books have overwritten words :)
Five Balls at a Time – This Juggling Robot Can Handle It
I learned years ago doing conference talks that even if you're giving a tutorial, when asked at the border what you are doing there you simply say: "Attending a conference". NEVER give more details (except what the conference is about, which they will ask).
"Protip: Learn to laugh it off. Another thing when you decide to be a bitchass; add a smiley. Trust me it makes all the difference. "

I grew skeptical of the advice at this point. Putting a 'smiley' after an unpleasant statement is the equivalent of saying it with a snide smirk on your face.
Yep. I've seen it in some other industries as well, particularly with auction markets like AdWords. One company will figure out a novel PPC strategy that pays out considerably more in profit than than it costs to acquire a customer. If this strategy also scales, it's a license to print money for a time. Problem is, competitors notice and mimic the same strategy, bidding up the price of the ad units in question (keywords, what have you) until it cost of acquisition is very close to the lifetime value of the acquired customer. It's not so much that the competition buys up all the inventory (although that happens if you don't pay attention) but that the price of the good inventory soars for everyone. So more value gets captured by the publisher of the ad units and less by the buyer.
I miss searchyc and feel sad that they went compleatly dark with no real explanation.
Spoken like a true code monkey.

Programming is about the joy of creating: thinking, expressing and sharing of ideas. If your argument in favor of something is, "it's bad, but banks use it", you've missed the point of programming.
> Note, US military for years has been advocating taking service men and women and retraining them for a counter computer security role to replace the independent whitehats.

You can't give them a process guide or a manual for this. It's something that requires understanding. It's idiocy.

I've worked with "DoD certified NT4 administrators" (retrained administrative worker bees) who didn't know arse from elbow. I walked straight onto one of their "certified configuration" exchange boxes via IIS and read classified emails over HTTP from the mail spool folder... That got me a promotion back then in '99 but it'd probably get me shot now.
So, which battle are Java haters fighting?

Not using Java. Not hiring people that will only program Java. Not tolerating "enterprise grade design" when a two line Perl script will do the job more quickly and more correctly.

I assume that's where the complaint comes from. The author of the blog post is mad that people hate Java and are using that hate to make themselves better tools that are not Java.
Robert Glass wrote a series of articles defending Cobol as still the best language in some ways for business programming. He didn't talk about performance, IIRC, rather about language expressiveness (mainly language constructs for writing reports). But what you're saying is not surprising. The disease of our industry is the notion that old stuff is icky and stupid.

Edit: I hate Java as much as the next guy, but this thread is missing the article's interesting point, which is that the real legacy technology is the mainframes which still power the large-scale economy. Shouldn't we consider why? Isn't it meaningful that the technologies we prefer haven't yielded anything capable of disrupting these entrenched systems?
How effectively does Groupon leverage its size?
Assembly is the only language that will eliminate compiler bugs...
I think you're reading too much into the parent.
The API docs are a work in progress. Please let me know which parts need work.
Yeah, so as it turns out, speaking in generalities is useless. Let's talk about the specific condition so those of us with a medical background can talk about the degree of difficulty of diagnosis and treatment. Saying "being dismissive is bad" is just universally true.
KickStart Money System
KickStart Money System
Yeah, I know I could probably send an email, but I have chosen not to do that.

As for reasoning, it was just a personal experiment to see how much karma influenced my decision to post. Apparently it was a lot because this is the first time I jumped the hurdle of creating an account to comment in 93 days, even though there were times I felt the urge to comment.

I also discovered that I get more out of HN because I'm no longer formulating possible comments when I read articles or other user comments.

It was a useful lesson, and I'm undecided whether I want to go back.