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Several recent-ish negative stories (Dropbox security, Air BnB apartment damage) about YC companies really demonstrated pg's commitment to an open forum

Funny you mentioned that. A few days after I posted a few of criticisms of dropbox in one of those threads I was hellbanned. All of my posts on that topic had positive point scores, one was at even 50+ points and sparked a fair bit of discussion.

I won't pretend that all I ever posted with my old account was deep wisdom and insight, some of the comments sucked outright, but very few are gray and given the timing I don't know what else I that I had posted that could have possibly been the reason for that ban.
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Correctly if I am wrong, I thought vim/emcas is mainly a CLI editor? You really need to have a graphics environment to display some of the advanced Markdown features, e.g. line height, tables, subscript, superscript, non-fixed width and fixed with font with markdown idention, etc.
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I think it is disingenuous to suggest there was a "leap" from the Discman to the iPod considering that mp3 players were around for at least 4 years prior to the iPod's introduction.

Apple certainly nailed the modern mp3 player in terms of what the mainstream user was looking for (easily usable UI, music store integration, etc), but they hardly "leaped" from the Discman/portable CD to the iPod.
Note for hackers: it doesn't matter.

Quite frankly I'm getting sick of these "rules" for what constitutes the best way to do something. Isn't that the manifesto of "hacking"...that there is no one way to do something? We all see countless articles on here "How to do this, How to do that". The fact is, all of these rules are just frameworks and how you implement them is up to you as a person. So my note for hackers is: your hero was passionate about what he wanted, that's a good co-founder

The recent story about PG and Dropbox said it best:
"This is why one of our rules is that we’ll break any of our rules."

[1] - http://www.forbes.com/sites/bruceupbin/2011/10/18/paul-graha...
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Although I'm not from the punch card era, I overall agree with the sentiment of this article. I learned to code has a hobby when I was a kid and then took a CS degree. During the CS degree I was indoctrinated out of "bad habits" that I developed as a self-taught programmer. One of these bad habits was being terse. I took my degree during the golden age of createFactoryOfServerProcessGenerators() type things. Now, with more experience and wisdom, I realize I was right all along. A development environment that comfortably fits in your brain makes programming more effective and fun. And maybe I'm too idealistic, but I strongly believe the two are related.
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I guess you missed the month of erlang posts that were posted because community was asked to post and upvote them?... How is that different exactly?
It's poor carpenter who blames his tools.

What he really hates is his lack of willpower when it comes to doing things the wrong way. Cut-and-paste enabled him to be lazy, but it certainly didn't force him to be.
He forgot "mitigating existential risk". Oh well :).
Interesting, I guess that's one aspect of software systems that doesn't come to my mind right away. With the increase in the amount of microprocessors in each car and as the code behind all that processing becomes more intelligent, I wonder if these complexities will make cases like this more prevalent.
> And remember that PLoS is now making a profit at that rate — no longer living off the grants that helped to get it started. At a rate of $1350 per article, it’s not just surviving but flourishing, so we know that that’s a reasonable commercial rate to charge for handling an open-access academic article with no limits on length or on number of high-resolution colour figures [...] So, yes, open access is cheaper. Stupidly cheaper. Absurdly, ridiculously, appallingly cheaper.

Open-access is still absurdly expensive. $1350 to publish an article in an online journal, seriously? Unlimited length and colour figures in an online journal? No shit. The cost should be exactly $0, since all the actual work like reviewing articles is done by volunteers. I'm sure that many universities and companies would be glad to provide free hosting for papers.
In next five years could we see cars updating their system software over WiFI?
I agree with the article.

My story is not as romantic as most dropouts that have started a company / followed their dream. I have had to work for a living, and because I started working in what was the equivalent of a sweat shop with very inflexible hours and a lot of hard/boring work, I had to dropout since I couldn't do both. The time spent and the things learned in college, however, were invaluable and I regret not finishing it.

With that said, I do believe that the industry still places too much weight on college/masters degree. And I think this is what amazes people: that a couple of dropouts that wouldn't pass through their shitty filters are some of the richest / most innovative people in the world.

A college purpose should be to teach and enrich people's lives, but shouldn't be used for classifying people, unless you're talking about people with no work experience.
The poster is completely unaware however. See http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=3146243 - I posted the link to check whether it's actually banned. It showed up and I could see it. Now it's dead without any notification or feedback for me.
For bonus points - add robust code folding to this, especially when the folding persists across edit sessions.

I worked on a large embedded system where all the principal developers used such an editor (there was some occam heritage). One incautious copy and paste of 'a handful' of lines, and you had accidentally replicated a complete subsystem! It made debugging 'interesting'.

Every time I think 'Oooh - code folding - what a great idea', I retrieve those memories.

More generally, any time editor cleverness is interposed between the creative idea and the source code, I get a twitch. It should be possible to work on the source code without requiring anything more than a bare-bones editor - that is all I can assume about what my favourite editor shares with whatever future developers (incl. myself) happen to be using.
Ask PG: More transparency on average karma?
[Note: Yes yes yes, obsessing over karma is unhealthy, we should focus on actually making a valuable contribution, etc. Consider all that said.]

The "average" karma displayed on a user's page is computed as follows. (1) Take the user's 50 most recent comments. (2) Delete the latest 5 (because their scores may still be increasing, making their current values unrepresentative), and the highest-scoring of the others. (3) Take the average of the remaining comments' scores. This is done asynchronously; empirically it seems like it's every few days.

This seems like a sensible system -- it's not too sensitive to outliers, ignores comments whose scores may still be changing rapidly, etc. -- but because it ignores recent events and has an unknown, variable delay in it (because it's evaluated asynchronously) and isn't clearly documented anywhere, it's not great for user feedback.

I suggest (with the understanding that there might be one or two other calls on PG's time) that

1. there should be some documentation (e.g., a link saying "(what?)" after the average score, going to a short page describing the algorithm and mentioning that the number may be a few days out of date;

2. visiting a user's user-page should trigger an update of their karma if it's more than an hour out of date -- unless user-pages are visited so frequently that that would be too expensive;

3. when the average of the most recent 5 scores is >= the average of the others, they should not be excluded from the calculation.
Generic comment: I like it a lot! Good UI, fast engine, good results

Secondary comments/suggestions:

1. After I voted a few movies I could see a list of similar people and a number of suggested movies. I could also see the movies other people liked, their votes and vote for them. As an UI suggestion make sure that when I put my mouse over another user's vote I understand that I can vote -- currently is not obvious

2.There is some french here and there...

3.I would love to see some simple "Watch this..." screen that is centered more to suggested movies and less on similar people. After all I am here to find movies!
The OP asked where to learn PHP, not a bunch of frameworks.
I understand the analogy, but on the other hand, the barrier to using a gun for killing people is nearly infinitely higher (I hope) than the barrier to using copy & paste to "just fix this little thing here".

So many times, when you need a quick solution for a small problem and you know that you have fixed this exact same problem a few weeks/months ago at a different spot, there's a huge temptation to just go and copy&paste those lines.

By doing so, you have just created debt. What if that code is using some API that you want to change a few years later? Whoever is going through the old code now has to fix up all instances of your copy & paste action.

What if the initial code contained a bug that somebody else fixed? They might not know about the copy pasta. It's very likely that they only fix the initial instance of the code and not all other places where it was pasted to, so the bug partially remains, or, worse, is later classified as a regression (which it's not).

So, coming back to your analogy, hating copy & paste is analogous for hating guns not only for their potential of killing people but also for their potential for causing accidents and for their potential to use them for any kind of potentially non-violent crime.

As the guy who is usually doing the refactorings to our 7 year old codebase, I'm the guy who is suffering from copy pasta and I'm telling you: I totally agree with the original article. I've yet to see a single instance where copy & paste of more than a single line of code didn't cause me non-insignificant amounts of additional work.
Then came the full screen editors. They were a bliss compared to line editors. Really. If you don't believe me try 'edlin' for a day or so. We'll see how you like that. Then you'll be wondering how come any software got written at all for the first 2 decades of computing.

I have been wondering that, actually.

On the topic of the article, luckily, the Rails community (and python, and others) seem to have embraced this idea, under the heading "DRY principle" (Don't Repeat Yourself). There might be a connection between that embrace of DRY and the fact that Ruby/Python afficionados tend to prefer "simpler" text editors (Textmate, Vim, Emacs, Sublime) rather than IDEs.
The problem is that a lot of people think that dropping out == stopping to learn, which is extremely wrong (at least in my case). I think that's what Michael Ellsberg is describing so well in his book.

Education is still important, people. But how you get it (formal, informal, practical, etc.) doesn't matter anymore.
The platform is pretty much irrelevant, it's the content that counts.

Sadly, this press release is about the platform, not the content.
No time for any of them - called out the sales director for being a bullshitter and amazingly kept my job for several years. Sold nothing, was like watching a galaxy imploding into a black hole. Stayed for the entertainment. Was well worth it.
My car wouldn't drive without software telling it what to do. I find it very disturbing that I can't it. I think life-critical software should be open source by law ..
why are you using tput ? why not print the ANSI codes directly with a library like this: http://flori.github.com/term-ansicolor/
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Of course it will. The worst bit is that it won't be just your audio system not working either, but some critical part.

Cruise control malfunctions can be relatively benign or they can be the equivalent of someone stomping on the accelerator.
ford syncs it's gadgets on assembly lines http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-20014787-94.html and no doubt that somewhere in the future that will be the way to upgrade ECU firmware. taking the design-production cycle into account, such systems should already be in advanced stages of progress to go into production in 5 years, so I doubt that.
If we say hackers are those who use their skills and technology to accomplish something difficult, Steve Jobs is one of the greats. He used technology to make technology usable, and that's one of the greatest hacks of all.
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I'm not familiar with the "60 Minutes" programme, but is there really only 28mins of content? (15min + 13min videos)
It's gratifying to get something up and running quickly. I do a lot of "copy and paste programming" to get a functional prototype doing stuff. it's helpful when I need to show a non-technical person (e.g. my boss) in a convincing way. ctrl-c + ctrl-v is my best friend

Most of it is throw-away code: just playing with ideas and different implementations. Exploratory programming is cheap these days, and I really think it's for the better.

If it looks like I'm narrowing down on something I'm actually gonna use, I refactor, rewrite, simplify, and delete a lot of code. ctrl-x becomes my new best friend. (I write in natural languages much the same way.)
Your "legends" have (had) no need to apply for jobs, so your point seems off-topic.

More importantly, I found your comment unnecessarily offensive. The post you're replying to was fairly amicable and argued to the point, imo.
Hahah, this made my day.

I have some great ideas for toys I want to make, gonna give them a try!
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If I see somebody who graduated summa from a decent school, I instantly know at least one thing about them: they're good at identify what the customer wants, and delivering it. You simply can't graduate top of your class unless you find a way to give dozens of (sometimes unreasonable, often unclear) people what they wanted, when they wanted it.
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I always find those posts about what matters in life and what not a bit troublesome. I can't really shake the feeling that the author just seeks some confirmation from his peers for his newly found virtues in life. an important aspect of growing up is figuring out what actually matters to you.
This is definitely not unique to the Air. My two and a half year old Dell Latitude E4300 has this magnetic "latch". Definitely a cool feature, but a lack of it would hardly be a deal breaker.

(I have no idea what Toshiba's uses).
Your numbers are meaningless because you're not taking into account the energy that's needed to sustain the climate.
Maybe what they like is making toys, not running a business.
Though nothing would delight me more than to be able to hack my cars open-source firmware, I can't see that happening by a long shot.

Security-by-obscurity is still a - supposedly - valid claim nowadays.
For a pretty innovative, awesome laptop (arguably the best ultraportable out there), see Sony Vaio Z (http://www.anandtech.com/show/4474/sony-updates-vaio-z-thinn...). Only super lightweight ultra-portable desktop replacement I know of.
There's a "profit spectrum". On the one side of it are money hungry wall-street bankers, who for them profit is the only motive all else be damned.

On the other side of the spectrum, there are non-profit companies. Some live without profit, based on donations, Others live as a "social corp" where all profits go to scale up growth, while keeping their main motive a non profit goal. Some of those non-profits can create huge changes.

In the middle you can also find lifestyle entrepreneurs. For many of those profit is not the main motivation.

So yes, there are successful entrepreneurs who are not motivated mostly by profit.
Apple upgrades MacBook Pro line with faster processors, gfx cards, more storage
Article is pretty badly written and disorganized, and produces little in way of actual facts, use cases, or code.

Not to mention, author has a conflict of interest since his company is developing (and selling training/consulting for, I'd guess) a Fork-Join framework.

Not saying he does not have a point, but you'd have to hunt that point in the forests of non-sequiturs and the underbrush of irrelevance.
> I hope we're not far off being able to sit your child in front of a webcam, sample their voice, click a button and stream the latest Pixar film with them as a protagonist.

The little brats (well, my own), are already the center of enough attention. If they want to make their own stories, they should go outside, play and invent them themselves.
Why anything from MSNBC even makes it to HN, let alone the ridiculous content...?
Hackers focus on critical infrastructure
It's frightening how cars' software is bloating up. I would've thought that a product that very easily kills people if things go wrong would have been under more scrutiny.
As an idiot I take offence
To further expand on the update interval, I believe that every 45 seconds or so a user is selected at random and their average karma calculated. I don't know if any measures are taken to prevent starvation or a user - there are (of course) simple techniques to prevent that. Whether they're necessary is an interesting question.
I cannot upvote this enough. If anything, programming reinforces the idea in my mind that complexity arises, emerges, from the infinite combinations of atoms of simplicity.
Grandparent was talking about how different technologies improved people's lives.

The vast majority of consumers didn't go from a Discman to a Flash MP3 player or a 3.5" HD music player to an iPod. They went straight from a Discman to an iPod. The Flash MP3 players at the time had very little storage space (128MB or less) which wasn't any better than using a MP3 CD in a Discman, and the 3.5" HD players were bulky and expensive. I doubt that anywhere near 1 million 3.5" HD players were sold, while more than 300 million iPods have been sold.
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I'm not sure it's so much the quantity of controllers/code, but the quantity and quality of the interfaces between them.

If I were writing something like this, there'd be a very clear demarcation of "safety critical throttle/brakes/steering stuff" | "blinky lights and radio"

I suspect that it starts out that way when the engineers are arguing about the liability issues of going full-throttle at random, but then it becomes standard, everyone gets a bit blasé, and before you know it the assistant vice-chairhorse of marketing is talking about how cool it'd be if your radio gets louder as you speed up.

Even then, I'd be arguing in favour of something like a data diode[1]. I can't think of any non-critical system that should have input to the cruise control[2]

[1] https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Unidirectiona...

[2] Of course, if it did, I'd claim it was by definition now a critical system. :)
Great article. Code expands to fully use all available editing tools. If you can see 1000 lines of code on your screen at once, you'll work with 1000 line chunks of code. If you have great tab-completion, you'll make your APIs big enough to make the tab completion useful. If you get a million lines of boilerplate every time you create a file, every file will be more than a million lines long.

What's great about ed is that you keep most of the program in your mind. There is no tab completion. There is your brain. And when you keep the whole program in your brain, you write less code and the code you write is better thought out. I wish we could go back to the days of ed, but all we can do now is consciously resist the desire to work at our tools' maximum capacity.
Hi, i like the simplicity of the app. It's great and i think you should not limit the scope to only teachers since there are many instances where message broadcasting is required. Doctors need to communicate with patients, church leaders with their congregation, companies and utility services with their customers. i think you are limiting the scope of the app.
Poll: Would you be part of "What is NSFW" poll?
Few days ago there was post on HN titled "Is Tumblr a bot fest". In that discussion i left a comment with stats for my Tumblr blog[1], and someone replied "Just for other's reference the tumblr mentioned is NSFW"[2].

That got me thinking, and I am restless since then. Just to make things clear, I was not offended in any way, it just got me thinking, what exactly is NSFW?

My blog is 99% dress up gils with occasional naked breasts, and yet someone might opened that and lost his job because of this. Also in that same week that dictator form that country got killed, millions of people watched that horrible video, and i'm 99% sure that no jobs were lost over that.

So what I had in mind is to create poll where I would post bunch of pictures, carefully chosen, and people would vote on how they perceive those images (SFW or NSFW)

I was also planning to ask/geoIP resolve country of voters, so we can have results broken by country/continent.

But before I go into this, I would like to ask would you find results of this poll interesting, and would you be part of it?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3143973

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3144208
I would like to vote / see results.
I really disagree with the premise of the article that IDEs encourage copy&paste. Full screen editors do. IDEs do the opposite, by making it super-easy to reuse existing code through code completion and docblock tooltips. In a decent IDE, copy&paste is often more work than finding the right method and calling it.
At last (assuming its as good here as in the USA, which is a pretty big assumption to make for internet services).
Of course, it is personal opinion but if it helps others discover what matters for them, what's wrong with that? They can always disagree with the author's points.
Car mechanics: the next generation of programmers?
If they really want to turn this into an enterprise (and I absolutely think they should!)

Why's that? What if she's happy doing what she's doing now (sewing, turning fabric and stuffing into something amazing for a kid), and doesn't want to be a business woman?

In other words, if she wants a lifestyle company, why should she turn it into an enterprise?
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