skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Great leaders are like surfers riding a big wave. It's easy to get distracted by the surfer and forget that the wave is really the important part."

I used to think that. I've recanted. I'm still not 100% sure why leaders are so important, but the evidence I've personally seen over the years is pretty clear.

My best guesses are some combination of:

1. It is true that the performance of a team is given an upper bound by both the quality of the team and the quality of the leadership, but people tend to badly underestimate how much quality and talent there is in the world. The average person is above average in some significant way. I would agree world-class results require a world-class team, but I think in general, for a given "random" [1] selection of team and task, it's a rare time when the core problem is a true lack of talent. Don't get me wrong, I'm sure it happens, but I've never personally witnessed it in 15 years. Whereas, I've personally witnessed many teams failing to live up to their obvious potential because of bad leadership. So, in a sort of mathematical sense it is true that neither leadership nor team talent is more important, in practice, leadership is the thing for which demand is much higher than supply, not team talent.

2. It is true the team is who provides the day-to-day progress on a problem, but it's generally the leadership making a lot of little decisions that add up over time; little words that affect morale, small key decisions that affect efficiency by a few percent, that little bit of vision-from-experience that avoids blowing a few days on a bad path, the careful selection of problems to personally take on. It adds up to a lot, and especially when the leadership is blowing these little calls consistently, no team is good enough to undo the damage... especially when the leadership actively prevents it!

I do agree that it's important not to fetishize leadership and never to forget the team gets much credit too, but over the years my estimation of the importance of true leadership has been going consistently up, not down.

[1]: By "random" I don't literally mean five people uniformly randomly chosen from everybody on planet Earth, but something more like, go out to a random company and get a random team working on some problem, and it is unlikely that the most pressing problem the team has is a raw lack of talent to complete the assigned task. Again, totally non-zero of course.
I read the post and I have to say that he's got a nice flamebait title but totally avoided the thorny issues that people argue about. In fact, I'd like to be pointed to a solution for the following problems:

1. I'm an old Web programmer, and my introduction to the Web started with HTML, not HTTP. I don't just write APIs, I write Web apps. I find it difficult to explain to people what this means:

<form action="/some/noun" method="POST">

If you are religiously RESTful, you probably think this is fine. But I'm a religious English reader. When I see the word "action", I think of a verb, not a noun. When I see the word "method", I think of "how", not "what". So when I look at the HTTP spec, all the HTTP "verb"s look to me like how-I-should-do-something, instead of what-to-do, and the resources (URLs) look to me like the what-to-do, instead of what-they-represent.

Small semantics issues I suppose, but here's another one:

2. HTTP is not a programming language, and yet it demands a (very) finite set of actions and an infinite set of objects to model the real world, where there are an infinite number of actions and objects. What I mean is, in Java or whatever OOP language, I can define classes to model objects and define methods in classes to model actions on objects, but I'm not sure if I can do it pragmatically in HTTP without getting yelled at.

3. HTTP statuses. Almost the same problem as the above. I have many different kinds of statuses, not all of them fit in the finite set of HTTP statuses, and they don't always provide the granularity I want. Can I return a non-standard status number? How would the clients behave? I have no idea.

4. Being RESTful means not being stateful. But you see, there's this thing called session and login cookies and many other tracking cookies that I have to take care of. Again, I don't just write APIs, I write Web apps. I would like to not do multiple handshake requests just because a paper says I should. I would also like to not get yelled at when I decide not to.

5. HTTP is RESTful, thus HTTP is REST. Please don't tell me HTTP is the best we can do. Can I have something more minimalist, extensible and powerful enough to model the real world?

--
A troubled Web dev.
Leaked Jailbreak Me iPad 2 Jailbreak May Result In iOS 4.3.4 Release
All of you know that Comex’s most awaited Jailbreak Me 3.0 for iPad 2 jailbreak was leaked a day before yesterday. While the developer was giving it the final touches, the PDF based exploit was leaked and publicly posted. The news was circulated like fire. Well, now we are listening to an interesting rumor. Apple is expected to release iOS 4.3.4 to fix the Jailbreak Me 3.0 exploit used for the iPad 2 jailbreak.
If you have an EU passport, mobility between EU countries is a piece of cake.
Mozilla themselves downplay the version numbers as meaningless. Yet, it's useful to be able to refer to a series of releases as all of a similar personality. Since 5 is 4, we should still be on a 4 series, until some kind of meaningful change to the personality has occurred.

Another step back in usability and information.
The following is a good talk given at this year's Google I/O on how to use secure Android applications:

http://www.google.com/events/io/2011/sessions/evading-pirate...
HTTP Client Rewrite in Node.js
Are you guys iPhone only, or do you have an Android client?
I created pretty much the same thing about two weeks ago, although I think your library looks much nicer (I'm just getting into Go).

https://github.com/silas/bcrypt.go
What College Does To You
Yeah, but try reading an AMA after it's been finished. It is really hard to find everything from the Askee.

I'm not intrinsically opposed to threads, but I'm not sure they're super beneficial outside of technical contexts or in an environment where people are expected to break a larger conversation off into it's own little set of discussions to keep the high level conversation easy to understand.
I understand your frustration but I think you are misguided. Standards (and their cousins, best practices) are important to think about in order to create diverse yet maintainable and inter-operable systems.

"A big problem with REST is that it is NOT a canonical (or even important) standard, but rather a useful pattern than can be used to make things exposed via HTTP more intuitive."

No, its not meant to make HTTP interfaces "more intuitive". HTTP clients are machines. They don't have intuition. When your web browser hits the HN front page, it isn't using intuition to figure out what links to display.

You can make an argument that for a particular web service, adhering to a particular principle of REST doesn't matter. But you have suggested that the principles of rest never need to be an important consideration for any web service, which I submit is plainly false.
Hmm, I think that those URLs are still different resources; one is 'the current post' and the other is 'the post named "Why I love REST"'. I would do a 302 from the latter to the former.
> No one argues that the Greek economy was in good shape.

...

> The Greek economy was a joke and it definitely needs to change...

Which is it?
> Their real-world relationships use very different names, but G+ forces them to pick only one.

G+ profiles have nicknames. Wouldn't that be suitable for this scenario?
I wish you all the best, but I'm skeptical that this could become a viable business. Is this a problem that people struggle with enough that they'd pay for a service to help them with it?

What would differentiate Splitterbug from, say, BillMonk? Or just an e-mail? What are you planning on for revenue? One-off App Store purchases, or something more?
Would have been nice if the original source were cited before he showed the comics.
This one works well for me, and it's free: http://www.robbiehanson.com/alarmclock/

The last version was released in 2007 but it still works great on Snow Leopard. I'm in no rush to replace working apps with Mac Store apps.
Ah, fair enough. They are indeed two different resources. Would you have a problem if I returned the actual representation rather than a 302?
As far as I can tell, the "Nickname" and "Other names" fields are only displayed in the profile; there's no way to say "this should be the name displayed by my posts/in the Circles view/whatever"
The huge number of lambdas had a tendency to muddle the first example; somebody should tell this gentleman about the `operator` module. Other than that, looks interesting! The decorator syntax may be a more apparent way to handle assertions about arguments in situations where numerous (or repetitive ones) are required. Hooks can be similarly handy.
Cool. My advice is that you should get into the habit of writing tests.
Wow, I'm pretty sure that if you need to get your social fix so badly that you're disguising facebook as legitimate work, you've got an addiction.

Step away from the computer for a bit.
It can, and that's what I did. But I decided to experiment, and there is some little benefit - less memory usage, and supposedly malloc() from one place can be freed() by another (or I think so). A lot of Microsoft products are still linking to it. At work we don't care and link to whatever latest MSVC provides, but for certain products to write plugins we have to use the exact same Visual Studio version (for example Autodesk Maya or MotionBuilder).

There are way too many subtle details (and more complicated with Windows's manifests, side by side assemblies and crap like that).
The first sentence could either be parsed two ways which yield opposite meanings or is grammatically incorrect. I can't decide which, but in any case you have a point. The first sentence was supposed to mean that the Greek economy was in bad shape and everyone knew.
The most desirable results for PDF (and, by extension, most file extensions) are

1) Information about a program that can read or write PDF files

2) Information about the PDF format

The fact that both are shown as the first two entries is desirable. And the fact that wikipedia rounds out the top 3 is great.
REST for the rest of us
1) I think an aggressive personality is common in many successful---not the correct word, but it'll do---people. Look at any "team" sport where one player tends to take the spotlight. With the Tour de France on, I can't help but recall all of the prima donnas of Tours gone by. Actually, it's so rare to have a down-to-earth, genuinely thoughtful and nice person rise to the top in that sport that it's always called out when it happens.

2) I think being a jerk online and lack of in-person social skills aren't correlated. For whatever reason, when it's a computer screen in front of you, people tend to be more aggressive about their point of view. Unchecked, that can turn into "jerkiness," but I don't think it's a one to one. Don't get me wrong, I know plenty of people who are jerks online and the same offline. I also know plenty of people who are jerks online and the kind of person you hope passes you on the highway when you've got a flat or run out of gas---it's a given they're stopping and helping in any way they can.

3) I'm a little disturbed by the implication that a stunted career is what motivates people to contribute to open-source software, but I assume it wasn't meant quite that way. This illustrates an interesting point. Given that I don't know the context of where your fourth paragraph is coming from, I'm assuming the best and that you didn't mean it as I took it during my first reading.

That type of small misunderstanding could have resulted in me (or someone else) firing off a quick response calling you out on it, or even less hostilely taking issue with it and trying to rebute it. That in turn could have made you feel more defensive, so your next post might have been preemptively aggressive, and so on. This quickly deteriorates into a cycle where we're making each other more aggressive without meaning to and give rise to this mentality.

Subtly is lost online. It's ashamed, but the way it seems to be.

All that said, I do think those who the community looks up to are the ones that set the tone, for sure. I can point to many a project mailing list that have been rendered useless because some of the biggest (or perceived, historically, or actual) contributors take it over with their overly curt style of responses. :-/
The cause of this is probably that those documents have been linked to with anchor test like "this PDF". Do a search for "click here" to see a similar phenomenon.
Inflation in Greece is currently sitting at 4.5%, so the T-bills are essentially offering a real 8.5%/year ROI. How on Earth is that affordable to them? I get that they need money now, but they can't expect to be in a better position to repay in 2 years.

Also, what happens if (when) Greece defaults? Do the T-bills become worthless, or are they considered a different kind of debt than other national debts?
Valuation, growth and active users I would guess?
I don't have a 'problem' with it, this is just conceptual talk. But I'd still do it for SEO reasons.

If Google fetched /blog/current as containing the "Why I love REST" post and showed it to me, and the when I clicked the link I got "Why I think turtles are awesome", I'd be annoyed. A 302 fixes that in a more clean way than entries in robots.txt or similar tricks.

EDIT: Apparently Google messes that up and often associates the content with the source URL and not the destination URL. Disregard the previous paragraph.
While Android may have more installs, they don’t have the developer community to build killer apps because the Android marketplace (both for hardware and firmware) is highly fragmented, whereas iOS is about symphonic convergence.

This seems overly reductive. First, the Android marketplace is quickly catching up with Apple's, at least in terms of number of apps. Second, it's not clear at all that fragmentation is the reason it's taken this long to do so.
www.hacknotifier.com does this (disclaimer: I started it) - but it requires the user to subscribe to our service. Unfortunately, cold emailing them (which we considered), would be considered spam.
It's redundant in that particular instance. But it's a representation of a resource. It might be nice to define the representation across your entire system so that when you grab a transaction resource with a GET later, it still has that URI in it. Or maybe not. But it's not obvious that this is a bad idea.
It's actually kind of lame that this pompous flamebait makes it to the top of HN, and then he concludes his post saying he doesn't take comments on his blog. excusez-moi, what is he the New Yorker? I'd prefer to address his pomposity on his own turf rather than here, so all I'm going to say is this has all been said before, and it's a bitter irony to spend time talking about flogging dead horses while debating the semantics of a meaningless buzzword with nobody but yourself.
You can start using the web version of their app right away by going to http://splitterbug.com on your mobile (at least it worked on my iPhone) and signing in with Facebook.
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> The huge number of lambdas had a tendency to muddle the first example; somebody should tell this gentleman about the `operator` module.

The lambdas are how you specify the constraints. How does operator module help here?

@ensure_args(a=lambda x: x > 10 and x < 100)
def foo(a):
pass

Here, the constraint is `a` should be greater than 10 and less than 100. Where does operator module comes in here?

And the first example is using multiple lambdas to show the multiple use cases:

1. `a=lambda x: x > 10` is for the positional argument `a`.

2. `b=r'^?-\d+(\.\d+)$'` is to show if you need the arg to match a regex, you can directly pass it.

3. c=lambda x: x < 5) # `c` will be picked from `kwargs`.

And here, the comment clarifies that c isn't there in the positional args. But since arguments are looked for in both kwargs and positional args, this constraint will work.
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We have both iPhone and Android clients and we're looking for beta testers for both.
There was a post on Reddit about this a few days ago.

http://forums.truecrypt.org/viewtopic.php?t=23969
Comments: http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/i8dqh/true_crypt...
I came here to post the same thing. However after doing a search for "PDF", I also got the link to R. I've never searched for (or even heard of) R until now. Instead of Java, I got IRS related results (W-4, I-9) and a link to Advanced Bash Scripting (a subject matter I've never searched before as well...)
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YC S11?? This is a feature.
Yes, I am making that claim.

Especially since:

1. That notepad file can be encrypted on the laptop; and

2. "Web app" programmers so often get security really wrong. This entire thread is just one of a huge number of examples of that.

Honestly, any hosted solution that relied on JS for encryption or authentication would encourage me to keep storing secrets in text files on my laptop.

Here's a fun, easy way to understand why hosted solutions are rarely a good idea for storing private data:

- Make a chart with four columns;

- Column 1 is "Unencrypted local storage"; column 2 is "encrypted local storage"; column 3 is "remote storage with JavaScript encryption"; column 4 is "remote storage with SSL + server-side encryption";

- Under each column, write down a list of every method you can think of that that particular system could be broken. Take your time and be creative.

- Cross out any methods that all of the columns have in common.

- Compare the results.
To argue a point means to advocate for it. Your statement was unambiguous, and meant what you meant it to.
Leadership, innovation and great sex are hard to talk about - the guys do a great job reminding us that an action we might complacently think of as leadership might in fact just be being a dick.
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Ah cool - I'll add the iCal version to the post as well, thanks! =).
Thanks for sharing this. I've been having problems opting out of pooling (mainly that it seems impossible), and some other tricky HTTP client bugs so I'm definitely going to he checking this out.
One note about your website:
I recommend enabling the controls on that jQuery scroll widget for the iPhone. Having the screen scroll away while i'm checking out the UI is a little annoying (and then having to wait a full cycle to see the screen again).

Other than that, I certainly remember keeping tabs on my roommate debts and loans during college, but it was never much of a chore and didn't bother writing it down. I guess some people may need this more than others, for example people with lots of outstanding buddy debt, but I can't see it being a huge number.

What are your plans for expanding this? Simply keeping it as is and doing one thing well? It may serve to function better if it helped those key users manage their debt, using burn down charts for a game effect, or something. Maybe tying it into a mint account (is there an API?) so it can show up on top of their personal finances? Maybe just adding a tip calculator/bill splitter typical app functionality, so people can get rid of their old one and encourage them to download this?

I'm not sure what the answer is, but at a glance it seems far too niche and not much room to grow.
End of Shuttle Program Brings Concerns of Brain Drain at NASA
Should call this app ArgumentCauser!
So in response to a vague and ambiguous query, you got highly relevant results including the one you wanted on the first page. And you're complaining about that?

Incidentally, the R Programming Language manual contains stuff like this:

pdf() Produces a PDF file, which can also be included into PDF files.

so it's quite relevant too. Admittedly, there are probably a few bogus results here due to incoming links like "Download the PDF file here". But given how vague your query was, and how common PDF documents are, it's remarkable that Google did so well.

Before your next post you might like to read up on search engines, tf/idf, pagerank, and what 'relevancy' actually means.

The only irrelevant thing here is your complaint.
I really enjoyed seeing this today. It's very good timing for me. I just wish I knew how to translate the software specific parts of it into more general advice or where to go for similar information on other products/business models. I did go ahead and start a posterous group and invited a friend who was enthusing about starting a business with me earlier today. And also started a wordpress site. I have no idea where I am going to go with this but my health has been the big thing holding me back and I worked 17 hours of overtime this past week (a lot more overtime than I have ever worked before) without having to go home sick some time during the week due to pushing myself. This has been a watershed week for me and I want to go ahead and start getting on with life. I'm not ready to run flat out, so to speak, but I think I can stop sitting on the sidelines of life and wishing I had one (a life, that is).

Peace.
Thank you both. Will add that to the applescript on the blog post. Cheers.
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The majority of people I personally know who tried, got in.

But try again. You never know when you'll get in. (A birdy suggested that your odds are pretty good now...)
July, 6: how to censor the web. The Italian way…
FYI: If you put an empty line between items, they show up on new lines.

For example, "ABC\nDEF"

shows up as

ABC
DEF

and "ABC\n\nDEF"

shows up as

ABC

DEF