skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's interesting (and partly true), but it's nowhere close to the argument being made in the context of political debate about what capital gains taxes should be. After all, you've presented an argument against all taxes (or at least, all taxes beyond what's necessary to maintain a minimal government). That's quite frankly a much different (and more fundamental) debate than whether capital gains taxes should be fifteen or twenty five percent.

The debate in Washington and in the political media largely centers around whether or not a higher capital gains tax will discourage innovation, which is the argument that Matt is addressing.

I think you have a perfectly valid and consistent view, but the original article was most definitely not "strawmanism". It might have been strawmanism if he was writing the article as a reply to you, but he wasn't.
Hmmm. Another comment whose wit is overshadowed only by its mean-spiritedness.

I guess I'll stick to threads about boring stuff like data base structures, algorithms, scaling, or adoption rates.

It's getting a little too hot in this one.
And back then no-one cared that it was anti SEO.
Thank you. Perfect metaphor.
Recession-Induced Network Innovation
I do not understand why people make such a big deal of the "double taxation" argument specifically in the context of capital gains.

If I hire an employee, I have to pay payroll taxes on the salary I pay him or her, and then I also have to pay business taxes on the value that the employee gives to the company in the form of increased revenue. Is this "double taxation" also a cause for moral outrage?
The idea that the economy can be saved by entrepreneurs that never need to raise money is sheer lunacy. I can believe that the funding climate might not be someone's primary consideration when deciding whether to start a company; I can also believe that it might not have much influence on the very early stage growth of the company. However, outside investment still plays a fundamental role in the growth and success of most companies of non-trivial size.
I'm naive, but isn't doing something over and over again always a sign that you're doing it wrong? Even if you have to work in PHP and write simple database table management screens all day long, there's nothing to stop you from stepping back a layer, for example by writing programs to write that PHP and MySQL code in whatever language you choose. I believe that if a problem really is trivial in programming, there's always a way to make it trivial.
I wonder if OP may be confusing the technical environment (PHP) with the user environment (boring apps).

I think you can work on really cool stuff in any platform.

Similarly, you can also work on mind-numbingly boring stuff in any platform.

Perhaps he should just try to find something cool to work on (something that really turns him on), without regard to technology, and then just learn that technology in order to work on in.

It's not about which hammer or screwdriver you use.

It's about satisfying those who will live in the thing you build.
Ya'll made me feel old today :-) I thought it was us Xers who were the rambunctious "zomg, how will they ever function in the work place!" hyper-ambitious folk making the boomers shake their heads...

Love it!
MBA students flock to new course: Hunting and Gathering
How to Change the World: How to Seize the Day
A young man sets out to seek his fortune...

Yes, it's the beginning of a fairly tale, a standard mythological motif - by which I don't mean it is fictional or trivial, but that it is universal. BTW: Matt does acknowledge that the next generation will do the same to his (at the end).

He's right about greater productivity - but if everyone is more productive, then the competitive bar simply resets at a higher level. It's an endless trudge, if the finish line recedes as you approach...

There's a sophisticated argument that with a smaller firm-size, you have more CEO's. The problem with competitive success remains that not everyone can be a winner - it's a zero-sum game by definition. But everyone can have a family. Everyone can have the satisfaction of improvement and mastery. Everyone can enjoy the thrill of risking a lesser thing for a greater thing. Everyone can take pride in effort and sacrifice for a worthy goal.

And ultimately, these things are immensely more satisfying than vacationing for months in Europe.

Talkin bout my generation
I would like Firefox to steal the one-process-per-tab feature of Chrome, desperately. Sometimes when I have too many tabs running in the background with just a single one stop responding, Firefox stalls for a couple of minutes ...
A quote from Bill Gross, bond manager extraordinaire:

"That ol’ Laffer Curve has a certain logic to it, but it only makes sense at the upper margin. People did work less at confiscatory tax rates imposed pre-Thatcher/Reagan but once they got down to 50 percent or lower, it was all gravy – promoting conspicuous consumption as opposed to higher productivity and overtime at the office."

http://www.pimco.com/LeftNav/Featured+Market+Commentary/IO/2...
"Even the first Google search algorithm was hardly a "simple solution"...."

And who else was going to try to build a better search engine, rather than just another search engine with more traffic?
In exchange for Bailout Funding, the TARP should require banks that issue credit cards, whether in their names or others, to limit interest rates and fees.

No clue. None. The guy is obviously a competent technologist and basketball fan, but manipulating prices causes shortages, surpluses, black markets, and suffering.

If you force a bank to charge prime rates to Bill and Mary Ne'er-do-well, then the banks will simply drop the credit lines. Result: The underground market takes over, and Bill and Mary get their loans from (at best) a grey market "paycheck advance" outfit, pawnshops, or (eventually) the mob.
SpearTalks: Seth Godin
Bingo. There is only so much coding I can do in a single day at peak efficiency.

The reason employers fear this idea is they fear that their employees might just slack off.

The cure for that is meaningful profit sharing. When the company's success IS your success, people get very motivated, and that motivation does not drive them to say "I'd better sit here surfing the web until I am the last person in the office". It drives them to cut out the dead time in their day with work, and when they cannot work, to do something they enjoy.
Actually subliminal messages are detectable by the naked eyes and ears. Studies have shown that if you don't register anything consciously then there is no effect even at a subconscious level. You may have no idea what you saw (for example, an image is flashed for a tenth of a second in your periphery), but if you think you saw something its possible it will have an effect. If don't think you saw anything (with the naked eye) there is no effect.
Ok. But you are disagreeing with the premise of the article. Not the article.

The premise is that entrepreneurship is what will get the economy out of this. Not capital flows.
Unions in some sectors are more powerful than ever. Nurse unions in particular are very strong, much more so than they were fifty years ago. The education sector, construction, and government employees at all levels, have very strong unions. If government policies destroyed the unions, why are the public sector unions so powerful?

Also, to a large extent occupational licensing has replaced unionization. See this paper for instance: http://ftp.iza.org/dp3675.pdf
Excerpts:
"During the early 1950s, less than 5 percent of the U.S. work force was covered by licensing laws at the state level (Council of State Governments, 1952). That grew to almost 18 percent by the 1980s with an even larger number if federal, city and county occupational licensing is included. By 2000, the percent of the workforce in occupations licensed by states was at least 20 percent, according to data gathered from the Department of Labor and the 2000 Census. ...Our multivariate estimates suggest that licensing has about the same quantitative impact on wages as do unions - that is about 15 percent..."

It's hard to unionize a hair salon, because anyone can open a competing hair salon and undercut the prices. So instead, the hair dressers lobby the legislature to pass occupational licensing laws which create barriers to entry, thus raising the pay.

Those jobs were replaced by retail and service industry ones which, in the 70s, were also largely unionized.

Were they? Places like Sears or Sandy's Drive-In were not unionized in the 1970's. Which service and retail jobs were unionized in the 70's that are not today?

One theory is that its hard to establish unions in industries that are mobile and have low costs to entry. If Walmart employees unionized, it wouldn't be long before a Target moved in and undercut their prices by using non-union workers. Pre-1950, factories were only profitable near rail lines and ports. The rise of the highway system and power lines made factories much more mobile. This allowed factories to move to locations where unions were not so powerful. This is the Doug Rae theory from the book I recommended above. I don't really buy it though.

More likely, I think the high unionization rates of the 1950's were a result of New Deal and World War II corporatism. As the giant "organization man" corporations created by the New Deal gradually declined, so did unionization.

I'm curious. You run a company. If you were interviewing a potential employee, and he announced to you that he might strategically refuse to come to work at some point in order to extract a higher wage, would this make you think twice about hiring him? Do you think the government should make it illegal for you to hold the candidate's comment against him in the hiring process?
Sounds like neoteny (rapid learning and childishness) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoteny#In_humans

I wonder if the ability to absorb new technology has driven neoteny in us, since our beginning?

Maybe the next generation is always evolutionarily fitter than the previous generation, due to being able to absorb new technology more easily because (1). uncluttered and unconfused by the old technology, and (2). immature humans are simply better at learning (the immature young of many species have more plastic brains - they soak up patterns like sponges).

Within that next generation, those who are better at absorbing technology (i.e. ways of doing things), and those that stay in that immature-stage of rapid learning for longer, will be more successful at surviving and passing on their genes. They don't have to be great at it, just better at it than others who can't absorb it as well (or for as many years).
Whew, that would be in 1972, as a frosh at Harvard, back when there were about 20-30 hosts on the ARPANet (the precursor to today's Internet) in the whole world.

I remember fondly telnet'ing from machine to machine (back then, most were PDP-10's running TOPS-10 or TENEX, and all had open guest accounts), seeing how many telnet sessions one could chain before something broke.

And I remember the first ARPANet mailing list, hosted at BBN (the inventors of email), which was about (recursively enough) email clients and mailing lists.

I remember sitting at a TTY (physical teletype--no CRTs yet) next to the IMP (the ARPANet node processor) late at night and getting calls from BBN to reboot the IMP if it hung. We had high-speed 56Kb leased lines to MIT, BBN and a few other local nodes!

FTP seemed like a miracle at the time, and we had access to a data store at CCA down the street which had an IBM data cell, which could hold gigabytes (which seemed infinite, given that our PDP-10 had 256K of 36-bit words and maybe a few hundred MB of large disk storage).
The article isn't titled well. Three of the 9 rules involve buying stock.
Because the built-in support for text views are pretty lame, editing-wise, and to recreate all that Apple provides and more (to make a decent editing app) is a lot of work.

I'm thinking about a Google Docs serious editor that uses touch gestures more than has ever been done before, with pinch and zoom gestures to change margins, font sizes, etc. Or (para-mode) drag a whole paragraph left or right to move from <p> to higher levels of header.
A simple solution means "simple to the user" not for the programmer. One Google query might take hundreds of servers to process and bring back millions of pages but frankly I do not care much as long as I get my result in less than a second after I hit SEARCH. It's easy to Me.
The older you get, the higher your "minimum income" level goes.

I'm 25, and my "minimum income" is ridiculous, and probably higher than most 40-year-olds'. The reason is that I live in New York. If I left New York, it would drop by a factor of 2-3, since rent is my biggest expenditure by far.

In practice, many people will be reducing their "minimum income" over the next ten years, because these financial problems are not going away any time soon.

I've also known grad students who've raised families (2-3 kids) on two student stipends. It can be done. Of course, they'll have to "sell out" and work for McKinsey in 15 years, when their kids are entering college, but that's far off in the distance.
In Strauss and Howe's book Generations (I highly recommend reading it, if not visiting this Wiki explanation on their theories of social cycles: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generations_(book)), they say very simply that whatever Generation you believe is yours, is yours. That is, if you were born in 1981 and felt that Nirvana and Reality Bites and Microserfs were items that you feel define you and your peers, then you are Gen X. If you were born in 1981 and are/were more interested in Hanson/Britney and Varsity Blues and not reading books (I keed!), then you are a Millenial (Gen Y). I was born in 1977, an unrepentant Gen Xer.

I think most of the comments here support this general self-assessment. (God knows that anyone in Gen X was all-too aware of the fact.)

P.S. Obama, born in 1961, is on the X/Baby Boomer cusp. But given his single-parent upbringing and general awesomeness, I have always considered him our first Gen X big-time leader. The biggest unspoken issue of the 2008 campaign is our movement away from a Baby Boomer or GI Generation president in a very very long time (Eisenhower was our last Pres not from GI/Boomer Generations). McCain, born in 1936, would be the FIRST member of the Silent Generation to become President, ever (Bush II: Boomer; Clinton: Boomer, Bush I: GI; Reagan: GI; Carter: GI; Ford: GI; Nixon: GI; LBJ: GI; JFK: GI; etc.). The real question of this election is: do you want someone from the old school that can't logon to a computer leading us in the 21st Century, or would you give that task to one of the do-nothing, lazy, slackers that you have come to know and love?
Enter Hacker News. I posted an open invitation to meet with Atlanta based hackers (btw I am not a hacker) more than one year ago. Now this is when HN traffic was probably 1/7th of what it is today and surprisingly about 15-20 responded and close to 10 showed up.
Breaking The Virtual Company Barrier
Although this is going to offend many people, I think a lot of people have kids because it is a dated decision, and people are forced to act before they are really ready to decide if it's the right path for them. The human lifespan's short, and fertility/gamete quality declines. Most people aren't economically ready to have kids until 30... but also want to make it to their grandkids' weddings, and given the reality of the human lifespan, this leaves a very short window in which the decision can be made, by people who are really too young to make it.
Ever tried putting a very long string to search?
You get this ugly "400 Bad Request" message from the server. Maybe they should politely let the user know that the search string was too long!
Brian Harvey's explanations are quite clear - I took him for the introductory CS class at Berkeley. He certainly has a firm grasp of what he's teaching (as any professor at that level should), but he's also very personable, and puts effort into making himself available to students.

He also emphasizes UI and carefully thought out programs, even at the (intro CS) scheme level.
Employee working at a startup. I've previously founded two startups and I do agree that being an employee is quite different.
1998: Yahoo was the hottest search engine around, getting Hotmail was a rite of passage, Neopets was just about to become popular, and I was reading tech news from this gray-on-black website that let me tick off which websites I wanted to aggregate. (I miss that proto-RSS website.)
Brian Harvey is the author of some fantastic books on Logo. I've just been getting around to showing MicroWorlds Logo to my kids, but UCB Logo has always been on my machine. I love Lisp so I'm all fired up to check these out.
What you want to do is game development. Preferentially for mobile devices, aka iPhone and Android.

Game development can involve all fields of computer science and software engineering, in addition to a considerable amount of Physics, Mathematics, Design, Music and Story Telling. There's nothing more complete and fun than it.
> claim they're doing things a "new way" even when it's considerably worse than the "old" way.

I wonder about that. When LiveJournal first had its scaling difficulties in 2002, anyone with any experience in programming kinda rolled their eyes at what Brad was doing and thought "This college kid doesn't have a clue." I mean, writing the whole app in Perl? Relying on MySQL boxes that went down frequently and usually took a whole cluster with them? Walking clusters to build a page? Putting your object traversal logic in the app instead of convenient SQL queries?

Everybody knows that the way to build a scalable webapp is to write in Java or C++, buy an Oracle database and leverage the thousands of man-years they've put into making it perform well on top-end hardware clusters, use stored procedures and constraints to offload processing to that database, and getting a big SAN for storage. Scalable webapps were a solved problem in 2002: after all, EBay and Amazon had done it, as had dozens of Fortune 500 companies.

Fast-forward to 2008. Now, memcached is standard scaling procedure. Federation among dozens of cheap MySQL boxes is standard procedure, with boxes arranged as master/master pairs to deal with the pesky failure problems. Everybody uses commodity hardware, and big server vendors like Sun and IBM are in serious trouble.

I think the real issue is that young workers have much stronger economic incentives to embrace disruptive technologies. They have more work years ahead of them and less investment in existing technologies, so it makes a lot of sense for them to choose technologies that suck now but will (or could) be big in a couple years, because if their bet pays off, they're suddenly on a level playing field with people 20 years their senior.

It's not always blind exuberance, arrogance, and inexperience that makes young people choose new technologies that are "worse" than their old alternatives. They could be taking a very shrewd (and unverbalized, if they're that smart) "fuck off, elders" risk.
The "one company for one's whole life" era lasted... significantly less than an average human lifetime. It certainly wasn't present during the Great Depression. It began in the 1950s and ended in the '80s, but even then, people were more mobile than was often said. The difference is that the ideal was to have a long, monotonically increasing career at one company-- it didn't always happen that way-- and that a person who shifted was implicitly assumed not to be successful. A major change the '80s brought about was a recognition that most people's involuntary job changes were through no fault of their own.

Well-to-do 18th-century people prized generalism and aspired to be polymaths. The professions emerged in the 19th century, but these were structured as lifelong careers, not jobs, run by individuals who would develop reputations. Corporate paternalism didn't emerge until the World War I era, when workers moved into company towns, and more services (e.g. medical care) were provided, directly or indirectly, by the employer than the community.
> Eich also praises Chrome. He says that the V8 JavaScript engine is "very-well engineered" and he describes the multiprocess design as "righteous".

He went on to describe JavaScript as "totally OK" and "mauve."
UCLA researchers use Scotch tape to produce X-rays
I used to believe that when I first read it, but now it's 2008 and nothing seems much different than 2000, right?
I too believe that this is wrong, but for a different reason than does timae. It breaks a simple economic axiom:

You Are Not the Marginal Case.

It is simply not valid to extrapolate (especially if you're MC, jeez!) from yourself to all entrepeneurs. You Are Not the Marginal Case.

Just because you and Bill Gates persevered, Mark frikkin' Cuban, doesn't mean that the marginal tax rate on entrepeneurs is unimportant.

Let's restate the argument this way: "Two of the most successful entrepeneurs of all time were undeterred by high marginal taxes on their fledgling businesses, therefore high marginal tax rates do not kill fledgling businesses". Sounds a bit different, eh?
Upcoming Django releases
A lot of our peers, whether through lack of work, ability, ambition etc, don't have the same options we do (lots of money, lots of jobs, interesting work), but are still very much stuck in the old-style world.

The "old-style world" is falling apart. It will die within our lifetime, possibly soon, and those who depend on it may be stranded, but a lot of them will become ambitious and entrepreneurial when they realize that corporate paternalism n'existe pas. As for differences in levels of talent between HNers and the "hoi polloi", the natural component of the difference between us and them is much smaller than we tend to think it is. Even the "average" human mind is incredibly capable.

This country went from a hideous economic depression to full employment in less than a decade, and can do it again. People are extremely mutable.
A job is a source of income
I think you're mistaking my comments as pro-union, they're not. It's one of the few areas in which I agree with the Republicans. I very much thank them for their systematic destruction of them.

Nonetheless, that's what they've done. Unions as a whole are much less powerful today than they were 30 years ago, even though some have grown stronger.

Grocery was one area of retail largely unionized. Some still exist under the UFCW, but are being cannibalized by non-union department stores such as Wal-Mart and Target which now both offer groceries.
Flat is the new 40% Markup
Diverse? How so?

Maybe I'm wrong but the way I see it, not many business people are using it and - do we really need another Zippo Lighter app?

Oh, you can do games I guess if that's what you're into. I just don't see a big need for utility apps other than what's out there already.
I guess that depends on if you can beat Through The Fire and Flames on expert.
"Bill and Mary get their loans from (at best) a grey market "paycheck advance" outfit, pawnshops, or (eventually) the mob"

Or maybe Bill and Mary finally realize they don't really need a lot of the crap they have been going in to debt to pay for?

Maybe too much to hope for.
Not all boring work is amenable to automation. Nobody has made a robot that can sew clothes, for example.

OTOH, I find myself still enjoying web/database programming in Scheme, despite having done it for 9 years now. I guess it helps to be able to focus on solving users' problems and not waste time wrestling with inappropriate tools.