skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You can pick and choose the parts of rails as well. I have a rails 3.1 app that doesn't use active_record at all, but it does use active model and encapsulates the service layer in model objects.
The lesson we should have been learning from Steve is to follow your own path. Trying to emulate Steve Jobs in spite of your own gut feeling is no better than going to college in spite of your gut. You're not apt to find success doing either.

There is nothing wrong with going to college, but you shouldn't be going because you are following someone else's plan, you need to be there because you know it is the right thing to do for yourself. Bottom line: Don't worry about what other people are doing.
Even beyond income, I think that what we really ought to concentrate on is inequality of consumption. If some person is immensely rich but lives modestly and either gives most of their income to charity or reinvests it I don't really see how they're meaningfully contributing to inequality. And if they just pile the money under their mattress we might as well just print money instead of taxing theirs, the net effect on everyone else is the same but the miser gets whatever emotional gratification they're seeking.
> Working against Rails, or any framework, is definitely
> going to cause pain.

There is a huge difference between working "against" a framework and working outside, or better yet alongside of it.

You want a Service layer that abstracts logic from database commands? You can absolutely do that while still taking advantage of the entirety of Rails. Your controllers and views are instantiating your objects and not ActiveRecord objects, but that's not a crime.
> In any case, as you say, the goal of college is not tomake one a better startup founder.

There's the issue. College is obviously still a great way for a lot of people who don't plan to start a startup to "accidentially" learn skills and do projects that could be useful for starting a startup. Both Zuckerberg and Gates come to mind.

However, what should young people who know in their heart/mind/gut that they want to become an entrepreneur do?

I would rather spend a couple of years networking, trying and failing on a small scale in business while learning as much as possible through books/other cheap or free material than spending $30000+ on something that possibly wouldn't get me any closer to the goal.
Devil's Advocate: Bernard Madoff used to be chairman of nasdaq and was only "caught" because he confessed. Even when the SEC was told point blank by Harry Markopolos that Madoff was a fraud nobody did anything.

When lots of money is involved some people turn a blind eye if it benefits them.
Is this supposed to allude to, "Fred Wilson's doesn't want his companies to IPO, IPOs want to Fred Wilson" or something like that?
This whole "with IDEs, you don't need to type that much" argument is starting to sound like a broken record. First off, it's good you don't need to type that much with modern IDEs because they all suck at keeping up with a programmer typing at a decent clip.

As others have pointed out, it's not about how much typing you need to do. It's about how quickly you can form, in your head, a conceptual model of what you see on screen and how accurate that model is. While dog-slow IDEs, half-assed Java-style static typing, etc may help you with that, Java's verbosity certainly does not.
What rule, that you should only drop out of college if you are working on a startup that looks like it could be incredibly successful? I don't think that is a great rule for everybody. Each individual has to look at the path that is correct for them.

Evan Williams, Jack Dorsey and Biz Stone are other examples of college dropouts who left not to start startups and then became successful entrepreneurs. Matt Cohler left college for two years, working for a startup in China and playing in a band, before finishing up his college degree.

Each individual has to choose the path that is right for them. Every incredibly successful person is an outlier. You can learn from them but you can't just copy them
Secrets Of A Good Half Marathon Schedule
I don't think YC really wants to fund people who would give up on a start up, just because of a 140k/year job. Start ups seem to be a lot of work, and you'd need to be really dedicated to succeed.

In my opinion, people dropping out of school for YC shouldn't be doing it because they see an alternative opportunity - they should be doing it for a variety of other reasons. The mental calculation should not be "I could do a start up and make money now, or I could do 3 more years of school and make 140k/year comfortably." It should be along the lines of, "I know I'll succeed, and I can't wait to do it."
Even if it is true, no way will this go through the regulators. Even MS had a hard time convincing when trying to buy Yahoo and later the Bing deal.
I would think it is mostly about the person.

Some people - like me, are very anti authoritarian and love to do things on their own and teach themselves how to become better at things. Some people enjoy a more structured life. I dont think any of the paths are wrong its just that there are different kinds of people, and different kinds of people take different kinds of paths to achieve the same thing.

Will dropouts save America, probably not, looking at the stats it seems as if people fare far better going the education route but a couple will succeed and because they are in the minority people will rejoice "Hey look, we to can succeed without getting a degree", what they missed though is the mountain of work these people put into their projects to succeed. There are no shortcuts.

College is hard work (Im sure), doing it without a degree is also a lot of hard work. And as I said earlier, it comes down to the person to decide what is the right path for him/her.
I didn't make a single social connection in college. There is literally no one from my school who I know.

College, for me, was learning how to learn, mostly that I could successfuly teach myself. It also provided some rigor in critical areas (I had a great data structures prof, for instance).

Oh, and I'm a dropout. :-)
I agree with the first half of what you said; getting bothered about income seems like sour grapes, but I don't see anything wrong with finding wastefulness tacky. (With the caveat that "wastefulness" remains subjective.)

However, I disagree with your claim of "just print money"; doing so devalues currency for everyone, including people genuinely saving money for the future.
Devil's Advocate #2: The entire US ( for that matter, the world ) economy is now functionally a casino. I am sure you've read Liar's Poker, Long-Term Capital Management etc.

When lots of money is involved, smart people do not turn a blind eye, they just ensure that the fine-print on contracts are done in such a way that their house is safe.
Steve Ballmer said he thought MS were "lucky" that they hadn't bought Yahoo. I don't think he will think of going near it. Unless there is real chance of Google buying them, but I don't see that happening even if Google wants Yahoo, as the regulators will go berserk at that.
I agree with the comment about the copy.

You need to know instantly what your site does.

It is really about the screenshots or is it about testing across different browsers/devices?

I thinking testing is the key word.
Steve Jobs wanted to kill Android
Actually, businesses tend to like them because the outcomes tend to favor businesses.
But Google has been acquiring a lot lately ( of course, that includes Motorola ), so the cleanup can be to make room / money for the acquisitions.
Zite Now Become Supports Multiple Profiles at the Same Time
Two answers, biggest is yield (number of 'good' screens made for a given run) and the second is bandwidth.

Assuming a 16:10 display a 4096 wide display would be 2560 lines 'tall' and have a total of 31,457,280 pixel elements (r,g,b). Each of those would include a transistor as well so another 31.5M transistors, coming out to driver logic at the edge of the screen. At 498 ppi that would be about an 8" x 5" screen.

To drive that screen at 60hz you would have to push out 31.5M * 60 bytes of pixel data (that is for 8 bits per color, higher fidelity 10 bits per color would be more. At 60hz that is a bandwidth of 1.8 GBps or 18 Gbit/sec. This is faster than the current DVI spec is rated for, although I believe dual-channel can get there.

The yield rate inversely increases the cost per good screen, so a yield rate of 50% doubles the cost, and a more likely yield of 25% quadruples the cost. This can be offset somewhat by bigger glass (more chances to succeed, semiconductor manufacturing is in many ways a game of statistics) but bigger glass may require different factory layouts (they might have to build a factory just for this type of display).

So Nvidia helped make some progress when they announced the Tegra-3 could drive 2560 x 1600 displays. That's more than halfway to your 4K display. And this will be the 'killer' display technology in the next gen 10" tablets.

If the tablets can keep up the ship rate then they will give manufacturers a better feeling about being able to sell enough even higher resolution displays to offset their costs and that is when we'll see something like this demo come out in a larger size.
Installing Io Language on Ubuntu
Weirdly, for me, doesn't work on Chrome 14, but does work in Firefox 6.
Java is the new COBOL.
How often do developers get to truly choose the language they use?

Every day

There's absolutely nothing stopping any developer from learning other skills and changing jobs. I was an enterprise dev that taught myself Ruby in the evenings until I had enough skill to move away from the enterprise world. I've been making a living from Ruby coding for just over 3 years now (probably worth noting that I'm almost 40 and have 4 kids). Pay is slightly less, but work satisfaction is so much higher is't a joke.

Seriously, your current employer might not let you change, but you don't have to stay with them forever. It's your life, not theirs

[Edited to add: I see comment here about job ads. What I discovered early on is that in the Ruby world, and probably Python et al, most jobs are got via reputation or mailing lists. pretty much never on mainstream job boards]
Getting Lay'd Off taught me more about entrepreneurship than any school.
Mentorship in Software Craftsmanship - part 1
Your right you gotta be dedicated, I just think some of this dedication erodes as you evolve into your mid-20's. People settle and get a little less hungry.
Just make sure that when you do this, you're not initializing it with mutable objects, e.g. lists.

x = [[0]] * 2
print x[0], x[1] # prints [0] [0]
x[0].append(1)
print x[0], x[1] # prints [0, 1] [0, 1]

That's because the objects inside the repeated list are simply references to the same object internally.
The fallacies of a coffee-drinking programmer
Sure, Aaron Greenspan/thinkcomp complains too much about Facebook. But here he absolutely has the State of California dead to rights. This is about as clearcut a concrete example as you can get of how "regulatory uncertainty" kills businesses dead. The key bureaucrat involved won't even state the net worth you need to be a payment processor in CA! His name is:

Jacob Appelsmith
jacob.appelsmith@abc.ca.gov

A polite email asking him why it is now official CA state policy to persecute payment startups might be useful.

EDIT: Mr. Greenspan, your exhibit at the end made me laugh out loud:

http://www.aarongreenspan.com/writing/20111019.aaupacket.pdf

Awesome and very funny. You might want to make these pdfs bigger, or just make the webpage one long html file.
'Seriously, your current employer might not let you change, but you don't have to stay with them forever.'

And as we've seen with a lot of companies, they're certainly not going to stay with you forever.
The Legend Of Zelda: Skyward Sword review
No borders, so yes, they would necessarily overlap physically. In more sparsely populated areas, of course, you'd likely find most people (and thus, their private property) falling under only a handful of different jurisdictions, and so mostly resembling counties/states as we have today.

But jurisdiction in cases between two or more parties who subscribe to different states/clans/legal systems could be determined in any number of ways:
- by (most commonly, I'd expect) arrangements and treaties between the most prominent/populous states;
- by having largely mutual sets of common law to begin with;
- by smaller states having statutes deferring to others' laws except in particular types of cases (a sort of inheritance system, allowing smaller states to mirror the laws of larger states which have existing treaties and case law);
- by arbitration through mutually agreed-upon services, or the federal arbitration service;
- or even by federal statute, in Constitutional cases, human rights cases, and cases against states/clans themselves.

Yes, inter-state law could in many situations become extremely complex, particularly in metropolitan areas with diverse populations; however, the low barrier to entry for states and the fluidity with which a person could change their affiliation would allow legal systems to evolve at such a rapid pace that overcomplicated, unjust, or murky bodies of law would be weeded out or refined by actually having to compete with the creation of simpler and fairer ones -- a process that politics today seems designed to avoid entirely.
Cool, when do I get my paycheck?
Weekend Project
If we wanted to maximize the value of our money, we could straightforwardly start reducing the number of dollars and introduce widespread deflation. What we do instead is try keep inflation predictable, so that interest rates on savings and debts can easily factor in inflation and neither savers nor borrowers are treated unfairly.

Getting back to the case in question, the link between printing money and inflation isn't magical, the mechanism that turns more money into inflation is people using that money to bid up the prices of goods and services. But the money that was in the mattress wasn't being spent on anything. So both taxing that money away and printing new money result in exactly the same amount of new money chasing goods and services.

You don't have to take my word for it. During '09 the supply of dollars increased by a pretty sizable amount, but we actually managed to have negative inflation because the Fed's interest on reserves policies managed to keep all that new money in the vaults of large banks rather than in circulation.
i go one step further, and put the domain layer behind a network interface (http or other) with a versioned API. IMO, trapping behavior inside a single application is just as bad as tying it to a framework. the domain layer needs to be available to the entire organization.

rails is just a tool to build a front-end app. i have many of those on my project. some rails, some sinatra. if they want to access shared behavior or data, they include the appropriate gem which knows how to access a particular API.
And it was $8,400 at release, and consumed 150w of power. It was also thick and heavy. Therefore, like I said, it would be very thick, heavy, expensive if produced even today.
"Developers usually go where the jobs are."

In some cases, I've seen jobs change their requirements some, simply because they can't find people when their requirements are tied to one specific tech. Not often, but more than I'd have expected.

Overall trend graphs may show one picture, but available people with required skills in a particular geographic area would show large differences in some areas (educated guess, at best, but seems to bear out via anecdotes from friends in my network).

The jobs that change tech requirements to expand the list of people that can use tend to be centered around smaller/shorter projects. A company that's been largely python by default for years may grudgingly open up their job search to php or ruby people, both in hopes that those people can pick up python, but also realize that they'll probably have new systems written in a new tech stack, and that's just the way it goes.

It would be easier for developers to 'go' where the jobs are if the 'going' was more able to be remote, but for many reasons that's still not a reality for the majority of tech workers.
I wonder if the flip side of this claim can also be true in certain cases. Could staying in college prevent one from achieving a global maximum? For example (this is just conjecture of course) Steve Jobs might have had too much debt if he finished earning a degree at Reed College, would not have been able to participate in home brew computer meetups and would have been unable to strengthen his relationship with Steve Wozniak. These factors likely would have prevented him from founding Apple.

Silicon Valley is a truly special place and I think there is a lot of value in taking a year or two off of college and try working at a startup, traveling and/or pursuing whatever else seems cool and worthwhile. Then you can decide whether returning to college is the right thing for you...
Child Sponsorship Isn't Exactly Child Sponsorship
Deca: a language for high-level programming close to the bare metal.
Wow, truly breathtaking that you managed to squeeze a claim of creating Facebook in there.

Have you considered that maybe if you were more willing to break stupid bureaucratic rules you wouldn't run into these roadblocks?

It's not even clear the law applies to you and very unlikely anyone is going to care unless you're successful (at which point it would be worth fighting over).

PayPal was arguably breaking all kinds of esoteric banking laws when they started. They were getting constant threats from state attorneys. In the end they worked it all out.
It's not just that.

The same bureaucrats perpetuate the falsehood that high net worth requirements somehow protect consumers. They do not. The extremely expensive surety bonds put in place as insurance (since FDIC protection does not cover money transmitters) only go a very short distance, and beyond that, they only cover licensed money transmitters. This means that the whole system is pointless, because consumers are never protected from the highest-risk money transmitters: those who never bothered to apply for a license (maybe because the requirements are so high). So despite the facade of regulation and consumer protection, the system actually increases risk while protecting incumbent interests.
i'd venture to guess that the majority of fb's shareholders are based outside the u.s.

fb manages to remain not only a creepy, privacy invading behemoth but also, for its size and investment, an unusually secretive one. by all means you should share everything with them, but it doesn't work the other way around. their books are closed to public view. how is this accomplished?

the newyorker ran a piece about this back in jan.
I don't assume that politicians know anything about me. Context can be helpful in getting a message across.

PayPal started before the USA PATRIOT Act made it a federal crime to violate state money transmission statutes. Max and Peter weren't looking at jailtime in 1999. Entrepreneurs (and investors, and directors) today in this space who break the rules are. Besides which the California law only went into effect this July, twelve years after PayPal started.

Also, it's extremely clear that the law does apply to us; that's why we were able to get an exemption order.
Flat universe
I think the bottom line with this is you shouldn't be using a framework as the entire architecture of your application. Frameworks usually are designed to do a few things very well, in the case of web frameworks, they provide the mechanisms needed to receive http requests and return responses elegantly along with rendering output from the server-side language into an HTML format. Beyond that, there is a much larger world of application architecture and design that goes beyond any "canned" framework. Web frameworks are great and very much fill a need but they aren't a panacea to make every project trivial.
This seems like quite a lot of trouble to go to, rather than simply move to a state with less regulatory insanity. Startups have enough windmills to tilt at without taking on more.
Moving doesn't make you exempt. Retailers want a national solution anyway.
While I agree that iTunes sucks (at least in comparison to other Apple products), apparently Steve rarely pulled any punches , so this is not out of character. From most of the book quotes that I read, he appears to have said most if not all of these things to the parties involved directly and has famously voiced many of them in public before as well (re: Microsoft in particular) just not in a Blog.
I think it is safe to assume that he was trying very hard to be around for the books release (even pushing up the release date) and was not trying to hide behind anything.
I am not sure I agree with all his views, however I do not fault him for trying to get his real voice out there as there were certainly a lot of stories written about him that he was not able to answer directly and now there is no question about where he stood on matters.
The problem with the apostrophe is that possessive forms in English are just so horribly screwed that nobody has any idea how to even say them properly, much less how to apply punctuation.
That's true only if by "apps" you mean web only. Java is not the most popular language/technology to turn to unless you are facing amazingly large scale or performance is critical.

For startups developing in Java is probably not a great idea, because startups need to respond to change fast and get things up and running fast, and languages like Python, Ruby, some kind of LISP are way better at that. You can always re-write your application in Java/Scala if performance/scale becomes an issue (a lot of startups dream about having those kinds of problems :D).
Wordless Wednesday
To your point - http://pastebin.com/Paj07U3f and http://www.cfidarren.com/r-178dissected.htm
> Take it from someone who knows: how good you are at your job matters very, very little in comparison with how much people like you as a person.

I think this is untrue simply because smart people who are good at their job are very likeable in general. Who doesn't like the smart productive guy? Conversely, who can stand the dumb guy on the team who never does any work? Of course there are exceptions, but my experience is that the social structure among nerds is largely a meritocracy. Just don't be mean to people.

If this hasn't been your experience, I think you had some misfortune by ending up in companies where politics dominate. There are both. Look at upper management - are they technically smart, or charismatic? Whichever one they are is likely what will have propagated throughout the company. Also watch out for mediocrity, that propagates too.

Of course, I'm referring to technical jobs, not business in general. If it were MBA, I'd agree with you.
According to http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.... still #1 in usage in a virtual dead heat with C. 4x usage of Python. 11x usage of Ruby. Its a silly bit of naval gazing akin to ... Is Blue Really Losing Popularity Among Painters?
Bing Doesn't Like To Say "No Results" Even When There Aren't Any
This is nice, except the grey navigation box obscures part of the image (Is that a komodo dragon?)
I found myself wondering if it was for a vehicular application.

I've never had a car with a built-in LCD info/nav/etc system to play with them, but I can imagine 6" being a plausible size for some given other standard sizes. Because it's bundled as part of a much, much larger whole than with a phone it's likely able to support a potentially higher price point and it wouldn't surprise me at all to learn that a high-end car brand felt a 500DPI screen would be a good differentiating factor from competitor 100DPI screens. 'Read as easily as paper' is a compelling selling point.