skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
C is normally considered an extremely simple, lightweight language. I think the main lesson Forth has taught me is that we can design much simpler languages in the same space without sacrificing power and flexibility.

But perhaps at the expense of readability. Forth-like languages look quite elegant in small examples but C's more explicit syntax scales much better to larger code bases, IMO.
I agree with your general point, but feel I should point out that this is possible in python using properties:

class Int(object):
def __init__(self, value):
self.value = value

@property
def value(self):
print("Accessing value")
return self.value

@value.setter
def value(self, value):
print("Setting value")
self.value = value
The examples you give are always so consistently different from Jonathan's Card that I can't help but wonder if others feel the same way, with the same examples, and that this disconnect between made-up examples and the reality of Jonathan's Card is the cause of the outrage.

Jonathan's Card is nothing like free soda, free napkins, or free restroom time. If someone sits in McDonald's and repeatedly takes all the napkins from the dispenser, he will be asked to leave, and if he persists he may have to deal with the police; the economic cost to McDonald's is minimal, and the inconvenience to other customers minor and localised. Ditto someone choosing to sit in the restroom all day, someone coming in and siphoning all the soda out of a machine, etc. For each of these examples, there is minimal economic cost or inconvenience to other patrons or the business involved, but a lot of inconvenience for the defector -- he has to physically gather up the items, sit in the restroom, etc, for minimal benefit to himself (what, he's going to eBay a million napkins?)

Compared with this, the Jonathan's Card scam provided an effective income of $130 per hour, at a cost of sitting in a comfy couch at Starbucks drinking coffee. There is no immediate social censure (unlike what would happen to a dedicated napkin-grabber) and indeed the defection is undetectable unless the person involved chooses to blog about it. And, as hinted above, it is easy and convenient to convert Starbucks gift cards into money.

These circumstances make defection a lot more tempting. Let's recap:

1) No social censure (unless you decide to tell people)

2) The return is not just fungible but is easily converted into actual money

3) Low effort required

4) Low time investment

5) High per-hour return

The confluence of these factors makes Jonathan's Card a bad idea -- far worse than free soda.
Most of the author's points have some merit. However, just to balance the argument out a bit, here are a few truths of the MBA:

1. If you want to become a Goldman (or similar caliber) I-banker or work at a top flight consulting firm, a top MBA is the way to go.

Yes there are other ways to get these jobs, but the recruiting processes for these firms are highly targeted and organized when it comes to hiring people from prestigious MBA programs. It truly is the path of least resistance. And if you truly set your mind to becoming employed by one of these firms, you can likely attain it once admitted to a top business school. We can argue the merits of joining one of these companies, but that's another argument entirely.

2. If you go work at said type of firm, your employment options thereafter are wide open.

I don't have statistics to back this up, but having worked in corporate for a healthy portion of my career, Goldman and McKinsey candidates were often ear-marked for positions that they applied for.

3. The MBA is good for "career changers".

Assuming you want to go the corporate route, an MBA is a very versatile degree. If from a top school, it practically forgives whatever you were doing before the MBA and enables you to transition into something largely unrelated if that's your wish. You need to do a whole lot of networking and build your story to make this happen, but with two years to do so, there's plenty of time. And the fact of the matter is that, regardless of how you regard MBAS, plenty of highly regarded corporates (including Google!) formally plug into the recruiting process at top schools.

EDIT: I understand many of the arguments above may not apply to the HN community as it skews entrepreneurial and perhaps academic, but I believe they have merit nonetheless.
Do waterfalls play chess? and other stories
And it's not "Don't talk to the police if you have nothing to hide". Unfortunately, you are always better off to not talk to the police.
it wouldn't be the first time i heard such category errors in javascript-related advocacy.
I also have a schizophrenic computer, but that points to the fact that I shouldn't have upgraded to OS X Lion.
Right. I never worry about attendance, or whether people are surfing the web in class or whatnot. Their money, their choice. You can lead a student to knowledge but you can't make him think (somewhat sanitized version of a Dorothy Parker quote :-). The only exception would be if no-shows cause harm to their fellow students (e.g., they're working on some kind of group project). Similarly, I don't allow loud talking in a face-to-face class -- it's up to you whether you want to pay attention, but you don't get to interfere with the students who do.
It may be difficult to acquire, but that doesn't make it zero sum. If you gain status by creating a billion dollar company or writing a bestseller, it doesn't take away from anyone else's.

That said, who gives a shit? People focused on status tend to be incredibly lame.
Whenever a web site has chosen a link target on my behalf, it has been wrong; and what's more, "wrong" for me varies by device (e.g. on a desktop computer I don't use tabs and often want full control over spawning windows; whereas on an iPad with a tabbed browser I usually want tabs created automatically, but not always!).

I think the rule of "least surprise" applies; the least surprising thing for a link to do is to not specify a target at all, leaving the behavior up to the browser (where the browser in turn bows to user preferences and user overrides such as contextual menus). For example, on my iPad I already configure my browser so that different-domain links open in new tabs but same-domain links do not, and I set preferences for a reason: because it's my preferred behavior. These are things the web site couldn't possibly know about me, so the web site basically risks annoying me if they try to override my expectations.

If a web site must feel the need to fiddle with "target" (which I personally think they should not), I think the bare minimum they should do is include an icon or some hint next to non-standard links to indicate what will happen when the links are used. This is another thing that browsers could theoretically do by themselves, since they have all the information about link targets at rendering time.
I have not read the original paper, but it seems plausible that the experimenters would have tried different game rules and this is the version which gives the reported result most strongly. On that assumption, one way to look at the experiment is as a test of the limits of rational behaviour. The 'vengeful chump' might be interpreted as externalising their embarrassment at having failed to identify the optimum strategy. Unconsciously they know they should have cheated, but it is more gratifying to blame someone else.
I'd like to read the entire paper if anyone can please show where it can be got (for free natch).
Require a twitter or google acct. Use gravitar for the photo.
That's not the principle behind social security. Social security is a store of your accrued wealth of today that is meant to be returned to you once you are retired.
Lynching and Other Racial Acts of Violence Should Not Be a Surprise
Let me get this straight. Anon claims the government doesn't give a fuck about me. So they come in and punch me in the face, and then say, "see, the government didn't care about you". This is like walking up to a person who's getting raped, and kicking them in the head while they're down.

How does further abusing the citizens somehow make the original point that the government is abusing the citizens?

Here's a pro-tip, Anon. If you are really interested in "fighting abuse" by the government, then don't further aggravate the situation. Do something that resembles fighting back, or somehow protects the people getting abused.
Why not just let me enter my email? I can't use this as-is because I don't have a facebook account.
I'm afraid I'm too busy to blog at the moment, but the code is here: https://github.com/troelskn/fejlvarp
This is really pathetic by anon. They are exposing normal people's user names and passwords that now anyone can use with bad intentions on other sites. This isn't an "f you" to Bart, it's hurting normal people.

Side note, Bart shouldn't be storing these passwords as plain text...
Woool私服
Sorry, but it sounds like you are doing it wrong.
Because there are only so many jobs that let the techies call the shots. A good portion of the coding gigs are in support of new or existing business. This means you do the grunt work to build a product dreamed up by the business people that integrates with "legacy" system. In turn, this locks you into specific platforms and tools with little to no leeway to "call the shots" outside of naming your variables foo instead of bar.

Also, consider the fact that some people want jobs like that. They can walk in the door at 8/9am and be out by 4/5pm with no worries and few long hours. Not all techies have the drive and desire to "call the shots", shoot up the social ladder, and achieve some level of public recognition for their work. For a coder who wants to work and do hard things, getting stuck at a non-technologist company could be akin to being in coder's hell. For a coder who want's a stable 9-5 and lots of free time to do other things--like hang out with friends/family--the "low status" work doesn't really look that low status anymore. It's all about cost/benefit analysis for each individual than extrapolation to a group of people.
Being pedantic here, but it is possible to have a society where everyone is a highly respected member (although it would likely have to be smaller for everyone to even have an opinion on everyone else).

The set of people who are _most_ highly respected could be a small percent of that population depending on the amount of variance in respect people have of each other.
That depends on HTTPS not being somehow blocked, impeded or stripped. Is this a good enough assumption? (Honestly curious.)
I notice it in my own life for sure. I read more now, but I read a lot fewer books, and I spend less time thinking about what I read: I tend to leap to the next shiny thing.

I know what you mean, and I have the same problem. I think that the big difference between the present and the past is that the monetary value of our attention has increased dramatically, and companies are spending hundreds of billions of dollars just to get us to look at them. It takes a lot of discipline to keep yourself from looking at a trillion-dollar lightshow.

I just don't buy the premise of this article, which is that because of all of these distractions, people are no longer grappling with big ideas. To extend your grocery store metaphor, it's as if the author were to argue that because there are so many candy bars, vegetables no longer exist. He mentions Richard Dawkins and Stephen Jay Gould as examples of people who would be superstar public intellectuals in an earlier time period, but I think that they are now. This is pure conjecture on my part, but I think that the percentage of the population that knows who Richard Dawkins and Stephen Jay Gould are is higher than the percentage of the population that knew who Marshall McLuhan and John Maynard Keynes were when they were active. In fact, I would venture a guess that Marshall McLuhan and John Maynard Keynes are also more well-known now than they were in their day. It's a lot easier for big ideas to reach the general public through the Internet than through old media and local word-of-mouth. Most of these people will never penetrate beyond the surface level, but at least they're aware that these big discussions exist. For the people who want to go deeper, they still can, will, and are, even if it means taking dramatic measures to focus their attention.
Creativity for Entrepreneurs
Great stuff, thanks for sharing. If you've done zero advertising, those are completely decent results. 130+ people trying your game in a week is pretty cool.

"The full version has had some very modest success, but I've realized that I need to add more value to convince regular players of the Lite version to convert to paying customers."

Yeah. As far as I can tell, the only major difference between the two versions is that more human players can participate. I haven't done any market research, but I imagine the vast majority of people playing a game on a phone are playing alone.

Building up the full version with a campaign is a good idea, but I'd seriously consider stripping down the lite version as well. Ideally, it should be a demo that teaches players the game and gives them just enough to get them wanting more. Maybe limit the number of creatures available.
Thanks - I'm finding that the consensus is "Tell me why I should use it rather than just saying what you can use it for."
I prefer that the un-earmarked money be given to starving children instead of tired Americans. Therefore, I do not find Sam's actions disgusting. In fact, I find them honorable.

Hitler probably didn't like Americans (for attacking him), that doesn't make Americans assholes just because the Americans had an aggressive attitude.
A Raw View into My Unix Hackery
Texture compression isn't just for smaller downloads. In fact JPEG is fine for reducing download sizes. However, when the JPEG is converted to a texture it is completely decompressed. Texture compression formats aren't as good at compression as JPEG, but they are specially designed so that they never need to be decompressed; they remain compressed in graphics memory and the GPU decodes them on the fly as they are sampled. Not only does this save graphics memory, it also saves memory bandwidth, which actually makes rendering faster.

Given this, it makes sense to store your textures as JPEG and convert them to compressed textures at load time. That way you get the excellent compression ratio of JPEG for the download and the speed boost of compressed textures for rendering. For example, id Tech 5 (RAGE) does this for their megatextures (except they use JPEG XR instead of JPEG).
Given that the reply seemingly has nothing to do with your post, I think this is a case of someone replying to a comment that is higher up on the page rather than starting their own thread.
It is pretty close to a zero-sum-game because time is finite and status requires people's time to pay attention. If you gain status by writing a bestseller, some other author is not being talked about now and loses status. Time is a limiter.

Who cares? Well, status is a currency in many professions. The most obvious are performers. Status allows options which allows better pay or more personal projects. Status allows a programmer to talk to graphic card companies and have a hope of changing their minds. As much as I wish it were so, pure competence or brilliance doesn't buy that. You have to use the skills to acquire the status. The guy in the back room churning out just as good of code doesn't have the influence (probably some exec does in that case).
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2884313

He was detained only in the very casual sense of being stopped to ask a question ("Sorry I'm late; I was detained outside"). He was not brought into custody, which is the usual sense in which people are said to be detained by the police.
and here i thought Apple was gonna buy an _Aircraft_ Carrier...

:\
Very nice, but where is this alleged AS3 to JavaScript converter? That sounds quite useful!
Ironically, FaceCash is the idea that got PayPal it's first round of funding.

Max Levchin and Peter Thiel initially got funded for a mobile payments application. "We hit this idea of, 'Why don't we just store money in the handheld devices?'...what would you rather do, take out $5 and give someone their lunch share, or pull out two Palm Pilots and geek out at the table?" (Max Levchin interview, Founders at Work, by Jessica Livingston). FaceCash, and especially its "Bill Splitting" feature, is the same idea.

PayPal's application was also "something that can store all of your private data on your handheld device. So your credit card information, this and that" (Same interview). FaceCash allows you to do that, too.

Still, it's not the idea. It's the packaging. Paypal's mobile app was created for the Palm Pilot. Yours is for the mobile phone. Facebook and houseSYSTEM may have been borne out of the same idea, but the packaging is very different.
I believe one of them said they used Node.js before version 1.0... and Node isn't even on version 1.0... so not sure what he means to say.
I think we need a case study on the core competencies of the author's point structure. Maybe we can re-org. Big value-add there.
You could make roughly the same points about the iTunes / record label relationship. If it were enough of a strategic advantage it might happen. I wouldn't cross your fingers though.
When Should You Change Your Ohio Health Insurance?
Are you trying to turn this into an intelligent design argument?

Human life is short, so instead of going through lengthy trial-and-error, like nature does, our brains evolved to make complex predictions about our environment based on past observations and simulation. That's what we call intelligence. It's not necessarily the best way to build something complex, but it is fast enough to be useful in a life time. I don't see any reason to assign additional meanings to the word like "how well a system is built" or to personify evolution into something other than a trial-and-error process.
I think you are right but I don't think the OP is refuting that.

The problem with MBAs IMO is that they teach you "play the game" more than they teach you to be better at doing business.
I couldn't help but think of a drug user's eagerness to attach deeper meaning to seemingly unimportant events while under the effects of heightened dopamine levels.
As an aside, Haskell wouldn't need syntax for something like `if', but has it as a convenience. There's no syntax for looping, you can do that with higher-order functions.
Michael Lewis on Germany's role in the European Financial Crisi
I'd love to live in a society where everyone is equals. In fact I think the future of mankind would be best to have all things automated so extremely small communities can survive without much external dependencies.
Richard Feynman: What Is Science?
Call me stupid, because I'm just a lowly PHP developer who's a bit confused as to what new things he wants to learn (for better career prospects), but the first reply just emphasises the balance between verbosity and terseness a language should attempt to maintain.

As a fun learning adventure it's interesting - and, as the article says a lot, mind-blowing - but I can read and understand what is going on in C.

Ask me to explain what Forth, or most if not all of the other examples are doing and you'd be lucky to get more than an, "eeeerrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr...." from me. I suppose that experimentation and innovation are more the point with this though.
Stanford video lectures on algorithms, machine learning, etc.
TBH it's a small demo - I've heard while JS engines these days are fast, they still struggle with complex physics simulations. I can't see any performance details/improvements noted in this release - anyone got figures?
I'll admit, it's hard to imagine any of those guys drinking beer from a keg, out of a red cup. I'm not sure that Zuckerberg's lack of media training and fondness for cheap beer at the time was a bad thing. In 2005 a fair chunk of Facebook's users were doing keg stands and drinking beer out of red cups.

Apple, in its early days, was Woz thinking "hey, I can build a cheap computer" and Jobs thinking "hey, I can sell people Woz's computer". I don't know what he would have said if you asked him what was next. I'm sure the Mac wasn't on his mind, and neither was becoming the most valuable company in the world by selling cell phones.
A writer leaves Microsoft Word
The experimental design deliberately excludes this type of signal. Anonymous, non-repetitive, closed book.
It is not an argument against social signalling. Just that there is something else going on too.
SuperCoorperators is an interesting book exploring these ideas

http://www.amazon.com/Supercooperators-Mathematics-Evolution...
Five months at WeWork Labs
Well my stuff isn't Doom3 level so I guess it's useless but I'm building visualization tools for the brain imaging community with WebGL and for that it works great. I have no fear that WebGL will do fine, it's an evolution of the Web the same as was seen on the phones. Looks at 2006, did anyone seriously think phones would be able to do much? Then a few years later Carmack shows some cool demo engine for iOS Rage which looks about as good as the PS3.

As for compressed textures. It hasn't been ruled out for ever. This is stil version 1.0 of the spec.
Couldn't tell you, I don't keep track. While LoC correlates highly with number of defects(making it tangentially important), I don't find it useful as a per day metric. It is just something to minimize.
I've only glanced at the Facebook API but I'm pretty sure he is doing it right.
If I may add my 2 cents - the design interface of this site is all over the place ... honestly it's such an eyesore seeing they can't even make the footer stick to the bottom of the page. Then there is the Terms of Service page -- such an embarrassment!
an excellent lesson in humility.
I don't even have a facebook account in the first place.
Nope, I was very serious. The narrative of a company using its cash cow to finance a product, given away for free, that directly attacks the cash cow of another company was why the DoJ went after Microsoft for Netscape. A smart Microsoft lawyer could do a fairly easy narrative that in the case Google (cash cow: Ads) is going after Microsoft (cash cow: OS) via a free product (Android). Throw in patent violations and it is a pretty good narrative for a not-so-scary-anymore Microsoft.

You and others (given the down votes) may not agree with the narrative and don't want to hear it, but it is a probable argument that can be used to go after Google and stay any effort to allow them free use of other companies patents. The original DoJ's case against Microsoft attacking IE was rather out there given Microsoft's other behavior (i.e. no matter what OS you buy Microsoft still gets its fee).

// I think this is my last comment on any Google story. Companies can do cool stuff and still do uncool things, just like people. Every company tries to protect its revenue stream in whatever way it thinks up.