skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There could be school without any of that stuff, and still be useful: philosophy, ethics, comparative religion, psychology (personal and social), logic and rhetoric, and perhaps an extra language or four.... Teaching should start with the "why" of life, not the "how." I mean, you can throw science and history courses in there, but they're really just "here's a bunch of facts that came from the past that you must regurgitate", so their value in enabling clear thought is low (unless, with science, you actually started by teaching the scientific method, then required students to verify anything that was taught using redundant, double-blind experiments...)
That's a typical programmer viewpoint. The problem is, competence usually displays itself in tactical solutions. Strategic and long-term planning do show themselves readily as so black-and-white, good-and-bad.

You admit it here, "even where someone is knowledgeable, experienced, and having apparently achieved great things, if they display something which indicates a severe lack of competence, my respect for them will automatically decrease"

I'm sorry, but everyone is incompetent somewhere or somehow. If you don't know where or how, you just don't know that person well enough.
I believe the human tendency to evaluate a person based on one's physical fitness, posture, and looks is relevant to society, assuming other credentials of a certain job or role have been or will be satisfied as familiarity with the person grows. At the very least, it shows the person can balance their life and have time to care of themselves. While having lots of personal time doesn't necessarily demonstrate that the person would be appropriate for a particular function, an individual who is confident, fit, happy, and clearly takes care of their appearance is often both good at balancing their life, as well as has the resources to do so (such as a gym membership, knowledge of how to take care of themselves, toiletries, flexible work hours, respect from others, money or money management skills--like eating ramen, etc.)
Might as well not learn to read either. While we're at it learning words is hard, lets cut about half of them out. I could replace half the words I use with grunts and get by just fine.
Because there are relatively poor alternatives to it. Think of it this way -- if people were used to T9 interfaces on phones, and you had a T9 pad for a computer, then most programmers would be entering their code using T9 because it's harder to learn to type properly.
Hmmm, except my doctors - in their 30's and 40's and 50's - must have received plenty of good ole fashioned instruction in handwriting. What went wrong!?

Instead, I'd prefer a web app that allows my doctor's office to connect directly to the pharmacy. Heck, a good one wouldn't require any text even - point and click on the medication.
This article is a bit light on content, but Arrington is basically right. As long as Apple wields and provides easy access to such a large, ever-growing, and eager market, developers will continue to build products for the platform regardless of Apple's questionable practices.
In the U.S., when I went to elementary school in the early 80's, there were multiple years devoted to handwriting - first print then cursive. But even one year is too many, especially because that is endless hours. It sounds like things haven't changed.
I agree. Barring absurdly high levels of natural talent, wanting to do well at something is the first step to doing it. It amazes me that this point has been lost on a lot of people.
It's not over-simplified -- marketing is hard. That's why superb marketing staff are worth their weight in gold.

Those people who can determine what people want don't just snap their fingers and pop out an idea. An iterative process is followed to produce that initial product. With your iPod example, a music player which is small, elegant and easy to use [so drop all the extra features the competitors have which nobody uses -- and which features are those?] took a great deal of research to spec out.

I see what you're saying and agree that product development is an iterative process, but without marketing you're depending upon luck getting you to that final result; and you'll run out of cash long before you reach that point.

I couldn't be bothered to buy a condom case either. I also couldn't be arsed to use Twitter but I'm not the target market for either of those products, so both companies would only waste resources if they attempted to match my needs.
Already exists: GMail and Blogger.
"Then came the fine-print details. According to the Food and Drug Administration, I needed to include a "how to use" guide with each key chain. I realized I needed insurance in case some fool inadvertently Bobbittized himself with my product during a drunken tryst."

"When my inventory dropped below 500, I took the remainder to a local advocacy group for prostitutes."
Download Free PSP Games Right Now
Search for a reputed PSP downloading site. This entails some research. Type ‘FREE PSP game downloads’ in the search engines and go through some of the reviews and actual PSP download sites. You will find several choices but many of them are not of good quality. Generally the best PSP download sites are found on the first page of search engine results.
From about 3/4 of the way through:

"In point of fact, if this whole article is "TL;DR" then there is no way you're code is going to be "great". Just ain't happening. It may be a hell of lot of other things, most of which are destined to entertain people on WTF, but it certainly ain't ever going to be great, and probably not even good."
Download PSP Free
These PSP download sites do offer free PSP downloads, but the download speeds are ridiculously slow and put a lot of unwanted adware and spyware on your computer. This type of website is not recommended, but feels free to give it a try if you have a ton of time and like having spyware on your computer.
Do you guys use friendfeed / facebook anymore?
Hi folks, i am hoping to tap on the early adopter crowd here to understand a question that I think should be of interest to quite a few of us.

Do you use friendfeed anymore? The most common consensus is that save for the hyper-connected ones, there is too much noise and irrelevant information.

Do you use facebook often? I have been getting plenty of comments that people like us are not using facebook much because utility value is low, and it is full of crap.

What are your thoughts?
I don't think there's a line between them, really. There's a gradient. People have egos, but what they do is not solely for self-aggrandizement, nor solely for altruistic motives.
Cheers to Kedrosky for saying "Dead" instead of "Passed' or something else equally infuriating or ambiguous.

Depression is a very serious problem and the US has one of the highest depression rates in the "first world." Rest in peace David Foster Wallace; I'm sad you weren't able to find it here.
One has to apply the theory into the reality of the situation. You're right on how it should be, but consider the situation of the guy: it was a single guy with a single product and about $15.000 in cash. He is constrained by many factors and it is my belief that the route he went was in general reasonable. He just executed poorly.
The salty cookies that are called 'cut' in America and England, are rebranded as 'tuc' in the Netherlands since 'cut' is dutch slang for vagina (written with a `k').

They sell pretty well around here.
Wow this guy just destroyed my childhood love of simcity....
And most importantly the bars and restaurants in Davis are excellent. Email me if you ever want to grab drinks in Davis.
If you don't introspect, you won't know why you succeeded or why you failed and you won't learn.
I bought Spore the day it came out. Played till space stage. It's ultimately boring. The 2 evolution stages are a lot of fun but the game loses depth after that. It's way to easy to conquer the world in tribal and civ stages. Space is little more than making colonies and buying/selling spice for money. The combat system seems like it was added as an afterthought. You can terraform planets, but it's not as cool as it sounds. There's just way too much micromanagement going on. If I'm trying to spread around the galaxy, it's annoying to have to manage riots in cities on various worlds while being at war and trying to stabilize several ecologies by moving the right kind of grass or bush from one place to another. The whole game is just incredibly shallow.
I'm saddened that the two highest-rated comments are snarky comments about the man's degree. He's telling an embarrassing story in good faith, and the best we can do is insult his education? Classy.
I respect people who, on at least one occasion, have been right when I'm wrong and think I'm right. The only way to really get my attention is to defeat me. Other qualities like kindness and honesty earn my regard and I'll do things to help that person, but that's not the same as hesitating to disagree with them.

Regardless of what this reveals about my personality, it's true.
And now you no longer have a proper mattress and your knees hurt when you fuck her.

Leave your futon back in 1995 when people ignored its ridiculous impracticalities.
If you learn how to read you'll know how to write good enough. All it takes is to replicate the shapes of the letters you read (and how I learned to write in print since we were only taught cursive).
Dunno about that. Maybe he (?) married the right woman :-)
"Our data come from 15,000 professional basketball games."

That's really all you need, isn't it? 15,000 basketball games out to tell us exactly how leadership skills in all areas come from.
1 Fabulous way to have a chance of being a half-decent writer: don't write like this guy.

Talk about wrapping a stinking fish in a giant ball of tabloid newspapers...
The first run that were just novelty items were not meant to be used. The second run where he went to the drugstore and bought new ones to put in the cases were the ones that were to be used. This was after retailers told him what was really desired was a condom key-chain case.
Would be nice if we could read the article and not just the excerpt. Since I'm taking a certificate course on Management & Supervision through my employer, this is stuff I'm really interested in.
Nothing in the abstract says that interpersonal skills aren't necessary and I find it hard to believe that's true.
I do like the idea of bullet points as junk food. good analogy.
We're not talking about "like" or even "can bear the company of" here, we're talking about respect. I'm friends with many people who I don't respect in a work sense.

Perhaps my mistake was not to append "in a work sense" to the word "respect".

Also, part of being competent at evaluating other people's competence is not to base your evaluation on a single sample.
Not especially insightful, imho. It focuses on syntactic details, and mostly skips functional programming completely.

Better read the article The Next 700 Programming Languages about ISWIM, say. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISWIM

And Lisp has a lot of interesting history: http://www.paulgraham.com/lisphistory.html
Agreed. He's shown that he can take anything, even crap, and figure out how to sell it better. I think that this example WOULD sell Firefox, for instance. However, I find that a lot of his stuff IS crap, and marketing doesn't fix that. Squidoo, for instance, is terrible and pointless, even if it IS on the Alexa 500 (and I'll never know WHY it is, for that matter).

Frankly, I'd prefer Firefox NOT market itself and focus on making itself the best browser it can be. It's not good enough right now to create good marketing, so it shouldn't bother.
Ha! This is a great way to do the old "desktop screenshot prank" on your friends' iPhones!
I don't have enough friends who use something other than Facebook. A grand total of four use Twitter. The rest are like "What's twitter?"
An architect whose code is bad is a bad architect. Anyone who doesn't know first-hand the capabilities and limitations of the tools, platforms etc has nothing to offer but opinions. Not even at the level of "advice". And we all know that an opinion and $2 will get you a cup of coffee.
You're talking about the second order. He got one order, found out when he tried to sell them that people wanted actual, usable condoms, and ordered another set.
Strong Disagree Making marks and symbols with our hands that other people can read is something uniquely human. Should we not speak because we can text as well?

To write, to read, and to speak are the foundations of human evolution. Technology augments these natural gifts, not replaces them.
No, I moved on to the next, next, next new thing.
Slashdot is into negative figures.
His essay about descriptive and prescriptive approaches to dictionary writing changed my life.

If you read the essay, you'll see it's actually about much more than that.
Insult him? It was the author's own words; I was agreeing with his realization.

Before doing a startup, I (fallentimes) used to be the consultant on "multimillion dollar projects". I agree with regards to the second comment though.
Best to keep things simple? Backlash from the community
Following the article, the condoms he sold in this way were actually bought from stores and placed in a keychain condom holder. Most likely the condoms stayed in their individual packaging.
The Ultimate Little Black Book
I've never tried it, but I know of people using Cusp, the Lisp extension for Eclipse: http://bitfauna.com/projects/cusp/
Sitemeter just launched their new version - https://www.sitemeter.com/viewstats.php?site=sm1giantbikes

Definitely a lot "flash"-ier (descriptively & literally) than the previous version that was mainly text-based.

I'm honestly surprised by the rejection by the vocal community.

Any Sitemeter users here?
People who are diligent, intelligent and most importantly, compassionate.
Is there any sort of beginner/self-learner friendly tutorial for emacs?

I think many people would like to use emacs, but run into too many barriers.
The value of all of these sites depend on how many of your friends (by which I mean, people who you actually want to see information on) are using these services. For me, facebook has the most, then twitter, then friendfeed.
Red Hat's customers aren't "normal people" either, they're also selling to corporate IT departments.

It's worth noting that Sun's x86 kit, the x4500 and x4600 for example, is really pretty good (if a bit pricey, but you get what you pay for).
Someone Stole Your Cell Phone? Tell It to Phone Home
MySpace Music Has Revenue Locked, May Raise VC At $2 Billion Valuation
Are Your “Projections” Limiting Your Success?
Spore contains Intelligent Design elements? How awful! Let's build a computer game in which the player has no direct influence whatsoever!
Where is the pencil czar?
It's not too long, it's too badly written (as exemplified by this "you're" among other things). There's none of Yegge's articles I didn't read fully once I started and I don't need to tell you how long they are.

edit: I read the whole thing, it's really horrible how the bad style and orthograph makes it hard to focus on what's said. Speaking of focus, it's really ironic to get a big lecture about how important the ability to focus is coming from someone who can't even focus enough to write proper English (your/you're, their/they're, come on):

"If you are finding that reading a multi-page blog essay is far too long, then you are clearly having problems focusing.
[...]
However, it's not all bad. If you've made it this far -- and it wasn't just blind luck in skipping text -- then it means you do have some ability to focus. It might just be a good idea to work on that a little, or possible a lot. Focus. Focus. Focus."

Stylistic issues and common deformations (ya, ain't, cause) aside, here's the objective mistakes I found:

"Get on with it", *you're* inner voice is screaming, adding in "just give me the *highlites*, the bullet points, the summary, dude.
These things may help you if you've already had exposure, but they just ain't *the* got the knowledge in them.
If you want the knowledge then *you've have* to get the knowledge, otherwise you know nothing.
"Well, I don't want to waste my precious time read someone else's long rambling crud!", *you're might* be screaming by now.
[...]
But *its* impossible to squish all of the knowledge into summary.
[...]
Honestly, *you* a roving accident waiting to happen.
[...]
Ponder it, *its* not hard once you get used to it.
If they're out there telling you otherwise, you know *their* just blowing smoke.
[...]
then *you're* problem is
[...]
then there is no way *you're* code is going to be "great"

As a last point, I found him pretty unwarrantly condescending.
This is masterful! A recommendation for the education of kids in general based on your personal experience. I'm hereafter speechless and agree with others that the submission did not deserve exposure on HN.
The tutorial built into emacs is actually quite good. C-h t
Charles Moore himself said, "…FORTH is an amplifier. A good programmer can do a fantastic job with FORTH; a bad programmer can do a disastrous one."

From my own experiments with it, I can certainly see where he's coming from - badly factored Forth rapidly collapses into an unintelligible mess, but when you work idiomatically with the language, it can be quite expressive. It's pretty low level, but worth considering in a project that would otherwise use assembler. I'd be wary of using it unless several team members were already familiar with it, though.

I haven't done a great deal with Forth day-to-day because it's a pretty bad mismatch for the problem domains I usually work in, but getting into the mindset of it was as enlightening as learning, say, Scheme or ML. Forth has strong incentives for partitioning your code into functions ("words") that are each succinct enough to be trivially testable / verifiable, and then lets you define new words via composition, building up to your problem. It heavily favors the same bottom-up / "build your own DSL" programming style as Lisp. For such a minimalistic language it has several impressive tricks up its sleeve, on par with Lisp's code-is-data. The ease in parsing Forth-like code gives it a lot of potential as an embedded language, e.g. Zed Shaw's "stackish" (http://savingtheinternetwithhate.com/stackish.html).

This heavily-documented i386-assembly code implementing a simple, non-optimizing Forth interpreter is worth a look. (http://www.annexia.org/_file/jonesforth.s.txt) There's something to be said for a language environment you can easily understand all the way down to the bare metal. It's not difficult to write your own interpreter for a Forth-like language (which is kind of the point).
yeah the space stage is very boring after you spend a few hours getting your things together

Trade? I have 4 systems within a short range of my home system, each has every planet maxed out and every colony maxed out. Which means I get 30 items of spice very quickly. When I stopped playing(after 2 days) I had a grand total of 90 million.

Terraforming? I have the maxed out cargo bay and have 50 items of each stage for terraforming. If I run out, I can go to any of my planets and just shoot the beam around getting only those that I like

Battle? I have 5 sidekicks, they are useless though since my ship has something like 11000 health, has the shield option that makes it invincible for a few minutes and has maxed out weaponry. Meaning I can take out another home planet(8 colonies) w/o needing to recharge/heal...takes like 30 seconds to hover over a colony, shoot up the main ring of buildings, and then have them surrender with 3 shots at the town hall.

Customization? Sure its fun at first, but it gets boring fast, by the end of it I just went to the database and pulled out old designs.

Alliances? Also boring, I'm down to only needing to do one mission to get a full fledged alliance and there is only like 3 variations there.

Looking back I'd say I spent more time designing the creatures, buildings and units than I did playing the actual game. i.e. I spent more time designing the town hall in the world stage, than I did actually playing it.
5 Hacks For Closing An Angel Round
The author clearly wrote that sentence to express the irony of the situation; your comment contributed no additional information, except to lay on the sarcasm.

Point being, when there are a thousand different insightful things that one could say about the content of the story, a seven-word zinger about the value of his MBA degree doesn't strike me as a particularly constructive comment.
how messed up is it, that Amazon's contest gets you more benefits than a TC50 finalist. And I'm not talking about the money.

How hard would it be for techcrunch to throw in some free hosting for people? Or how about a few counseling sessions from one of the judges?(i.e. like apprenticeship)
blame the lawyers.
Ten Aspects of Web 2.0 Strategy That Every CTO and CIO Should Know
Could you please link to it (I tried finding it via google)?

Edit: I found this: http://is.gd/2CpH

Is that the one you were talking about?
Well, it makes sense if the people/information they can target. It'll work well for B2B ads without a doubt.
STFU and go back to digg or reddit
My bad, I apparently missed that sentence.
If this isn't "Hacker News" to you, it will be soon: start with "Consider The Lobster" or "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again", two amazing essay collections. The audiobook for "Lobster" is narrated by DFW and footnoted in the audio.

Here's a DFW piece on the McCain 2000 campaign for Rolling Stone, which is especially resonant this year:

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/18420304/the_weas...
I think it's a good strategy. The existing ad networks are pretty restrictive and not particularly innovative.

Worked pretty well for stumbleupon.
Why Gnip Will Displace Google - Push Model
I had the same problem. You have to click the "choose download location" link. Here's a mirror: s3.amazonaws.com/2008/nba_paper.pdf

In short, an NBA coach who has never been an NBA player will tend to have a worse W-L record than a coach who has played in the NBA. And NBA allstars who become coaches have the best coaching records. From the paper: "For the typical team, the difference between having a coach who never played NBA basketball, and one who himself played many years of allstar basketball, is approximately six extra places up the league table."

Which is interesting, but yes, let's be careful when drawing conclusions and generalizations. To that end the paper said "our findings may be relevant to a range of high-performance workplaces where the employees are experts." The researchers merely found some data that suggested a coach's past performance as a player was positively correlated to his W-L record as a head coach. The paper did not conclude that interpersonal skills were irrelevant to a coach's record, nor did it conclude that interpersonal skills mattered less than playing skills. The researchers did not interview any people or even define terms like leadership, interpersonal skills or expert knowledge. They did milk 8 seasons' worth of Sporting News though, their primary source.
Divide by zero, no doubt.
To be honest it may even be useful.

If you're a founder occupying the retail insurance space and you're getting ads served about retail insurance opportunities then it's obviously no good.

If you're a founder occupying the retail insurance space and you're getting ads served about support for retail insurers then it's a hell of a lot better than the crap you get on google.