skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well, if he isn't then the argument is moot. But we have to trust Rand, and trust context: a famous, controversial architect takes him under his wing and loves his stuff, and the right sorts of people like his stuff. I've found that similar situations occur in real life, where there are particular movements of people with similar beliefs.

If the original plans sucked... well, I think that morally he still has the right. But the point of the novel is that if they sucked he wouldn't BE in that situation. He submits plans because he wants to help the middle class, which will get hurt vastly by this plan. And his plans are good enough that his absolute worst enemy agrees with how practical they are.

Dynamite is the only way to remove architecture, especially if the rights to building it are removed from you. A playwright can choose to remove his play from circulation. An artist can rip apart a painting. Roark can't do that so easily. And I think he has the right to remove his idea even if it's brilliant. In particular, he and Peter signed a contract that Keating would get it built exactly to standards, and Keating broke that. So there's some moral precedent: signs of his anticipating this happening. It's not a random act. Similarly, playwrights can choose to retroactively deny you performing rights if you go to far. It's happened before. There was controversy over Pinter performing a Beckett play a year or two ago, where Pinter changed one of the core parts of the play. It was resolved in Pinter's favor only because Pinter was Beckett's good friend, and understands his work thoroughly.

What's this about the Sydney Opera House? I don't know this story.

And, because I've seen your name pop up before, I feel like I ought to tell you that even though we disagree a lot, I've liked every debate we've gotten into. Thanks. :-)
The original one is a thorough discussion of Gladwell, his life, and his beliefs. This article was a poorly-written attempt to get hits through controversy alone. It doesn't show Rand off well, and it cites Gladwell out of context.

If you disagree, I'd love to discuss. But let's do it by actually making arguments back and forth. Let's put an effort into it.
How? By attempting to clarify my thoughts? I'm not the one here that's using name-calling.
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FTA:

Well, according to Ayn Rand everything in the world grinds to a halt. In her bizarre world view, no replacements are available amongst the rest of humanity to rise up to the occasion and take over from the cry-babies who have gone home in a snit.

Then, citing Gladwell out of context:

Then there's the question of why so many Asian students excel at mathematics:

And then there are the math geniuses who, as anyone can’t help noticing, are disproportionately Asian. Citing the work of an educational researcher at the University of Pennsylvania, Gladwell attributes this phenomenon not to some innate mathematical ability that Asians possess but to the fact that children in Asian countries are willing to work longer and harder than their Western counterparts. That willingness, Gladwell continues, is due to a cultural legacy of hard work that stems from the cultivation of rice. Turning to a historian who studies ancient Chinese peasant proverbs, Gladwell marvels at what Chinese rice farmers used to tell one another: “No one who can rise before dawn 360 days a year fails to make his family rich.”

Elsewhere in this thread was an argument from somebody who saw this and assumed that Gladwell was being racist and saying that working in rice paddies make Chinese people hard-working.

Then it sums up:

So the question is then: Are the successful truly independent of the society within which they grew up or do they owe their success, at least in part, to the benefits, attitudes, and advantages it bestowed upon them?

Read the entire article, Why Success Is More Circumstantial Than Personal.

Who is right? Malcolm Gladwell or Ayn Rand?

It doesn't add anything of interest. It doesn't make an initial comparison. It doesn't argue about how they're opposed in any way. We the commenters did that.
"Hulu is designed specifically for viewing "professional" content. That means that the focus of the site's layout becomes geared not towards usability, but towards aesthetic."

It's too bad that one can't seem to have both "professional" and "usable". I rank them like this in terms of preference:

1. usable and aesthetic
2. usable
3. aesthetic

"However, when you're adding dynamic content, it's too much of a bother to generate an image for each new item."

Then specify Futura in the CSS rules with a fallback, or don't insist on the use of a font that isn't reasonably reliable to be on everyone's machine. Let's use an interpreted VM to duplicate capabilities (text rendering) that the platform (the browser) already does natively. I mean, we have fast processors right? Every one of these is additional embedded objects potentially hampers the smooth viewing of the focus content: the video.

If the display around the video matters to not get in the way, then you should be distributing extremely high quality files that people can watch full screen using the video viewer of their choice without the risk of latency issues. The fact is is that hulu is, by definition, a low definition distribution platform for quick consumption. While it does have features that succeed in this area, and it does have a different focus than youtube, it has just as many issues (and benefits) as every other interface.
I'm in class, and nothing's going on, and I love this debate, and it concerns two authors who I've read and enjoyed reading. Hell, I love debating in general. This is what I do rather than play Halo.

Sorry if I'm beating a dead horse.
Oh yes you are. You are being a rude asshole.

Is that what they teach you in the Rand Club?
I feel like I have to work harder with Javascript than with other languages to understand what is going on. One example is the definition of classes. I have to execute each line of code in my head in order to see the big picture. Classes seem to be more succinctly expressed in other languages.
The Randians I have met are pompous jackasses and blowhards.
It's not a theory he came up with, that Asian cultures tend to have stronger and more rigid work ethics because rice is labor-intensive, whereas Europeans tend to seek clever ways of eliminating work because the farming of traditional European grains is capital-intensive. I don't buy it, but it's not a crack theory and Gladwell isn't the first to propose it.
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My favorite Randian hero is not from a Rand novel, but Final Fantasy 6: Kefka.
Baffling and exciting in the same way that the set of reals is larger than the set of integers even though both are infinite. Also, Zeno's Paradox is my favorite.
At least I'm not a Huxleyite. :-P

But seriously. What am I doing that's rude? I said that I thought that Rand was misread, and that I thought it wasn't necessarily bad that she writes in black-and-white terms. I also said that I think it's a mistake of the people who follow her more seriously to assume that the world really is black-and-white. I don't think I was being rude or an asshole. Am I wrong?
How two of the world's largest websites use Linux for high availability
My personal pet peeve is that a language for the browser was standardized, instead of a simple generic bytecode format. But then I have a whole lots of pet peeves about the browser as a development platform.
If you practiced basketball for 10,000 hours then you would be fucking awesome, regardless of having a contract.

The right things don't exist... or have we already forgotten the whole "do what you love" concept?
There is no easier way to bump your traffic up than by dissing Ayn Rand. Well, maybe dissing Jesus might get you more traffic.

It's hilarious seeing all the fanatics go rabid.
> one hour a day is what many of us have to pursue other personal goals different from work, family, etc.

Perhaps this lifestyle precludes being "fucking awesome"?
He should be Joe the Loser.
actually skribit.com came out of startup weekend 1 in Atlanta and it is successful.
In Rand;s crazy world he did.
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Also, check out http://i.venuem.net/ychn

VenueM is a general purpose solution for turning any RSS feed into a clean looking iPhone web site.
I've had good and bad experiences with different apple "genii". One time I needed to replace the little detachable extension cord segment that goes from the power adapter to the wall outlet and the guy at the palo alto store was hostile to me and flat out refused to give me a part number or any useful information (other than to suggest I purchase a whole new $100 power adapter). I eventually found someone on craigslist who was willing to sell me theirs for $15. But another time when my GPU failed a guy at the emeryville store saw to it that I was sent a new powerbook by overnight delivery.
[eBook] Volume I: Fundamentals of Parallel Computation
How is which rude?

Rand is rude when she dismisses some of her critics because she often refuses outright to admit that any of them have valid points.
For FCC Chair, Obama Should Look Outside the Beltway
Yeah. Furthermore, as an article here said a while ago, Jobs doesn't want to retire. He loves being the head of Apple.

Once he's forced to retire, I'd think Cook would make a good replacement. Apple's got a ton of brilliant people with the exact same vision as Jobs. He's built up a really top-notch team.
Maybe, but that's besides the point. Seems like the weekend was worth it for the lessons learned alone, regardless of actual failure or success.
Spud Webb is only 5'6" tall. He played in the NBA for 13 years and won the 1986 slam dunk contest with a "180-degree reverse two-handed strawberry jam."

He was better than all the seven-feet-tall guys in that contest in 1986.

Assessing potential is hard. For example, one might assume that "height" is a phenotypical requirement for being an elite basketballer. But Webb proved that assumption is incorrect.

You'll likely make similar mistakes assessing your own potential. So why bother? Do what you love and let the chips fall where they may.
Which is the original link?
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Anomalies aren't evidence.

The strawberry jam was awesome though:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l-IoInRUjDM
Rand thought that she was a great philospher when in reality she was a mediocrity.

Her heroes likewise see themselves as ubermensch when they are in reality nothing more than pompous assholes.
I own a Kawasaki Ninja 650R. A fairly slow bike by sportbike standards. It does 0-60MPH in about 3.8 seconds. Frankly, that feels very slow. I've been riding for many years though.

It's amazing how your brain and body adapts to fast speeds.
Request: What do you want in a OpenSource MySQL Monitoring solution?
Hiroshima: The Lost Photographs
those are reasons not to upmod it, but I thought the flag was for spam. do I misunderstand? am I to flag everything I consider a waste of time??
"Chinese Students: They work much harder at their studies and exhibit greater patience in problem-solving than their American counterparts thanks to their cultural legacy of long days toiling in rice paddies."

Gladwell is a great writer, but this point is not him at his best. I'm married to a Chinese-born woman and we have plenty of Chinese friends and co-workers. They are indeed a hard-working people, but there are no rice paddies in northern China (too cold), where they work just as hard and do not eat much rice. Their preferred cereal grain is wheat, eaten primarily as noodles and buns. Unfortunately for point cited, it's also the preferred grain of much of the rest of the world.

A more important question is "why have the Chinese suddenly become more productive in the last 25 years?" The culture is much the same now as it was then. What changed? Economic freedom and the decline of economic authoritarianism.

"Having to give something back to the society that developed you" is exactly the argument that the Soviets used to justify prohibiting emmigration, etc. Nice.
Circuit City Chapter 11 filing brings up warranty issues
But it costs more to provide customer support as a smaller player - you have to provide the same geographic availability of service providers, the same ratio of support techs per customer, all without the advantage of economies of scale. IMHO Dell's fall from customer service heaven is purely a result of their own obsession with budget computers and the race to the bottom. So long as Apple remains a premium brand I don't think they'll have trouble keeping good service.

I am a Mac user myself, and while my laptop has been far from trouble-free, I've had zero trouble with customer service. Every single time my phone call has been answered in less than 2 minutes, nobody's ever hassled me or tried to weasel their way out of a genuinely defective part, and many reps have even offered more expensive solutions (i.e. shipping the machine back to Apple instead of visiting a local shop, or full machine replacement) instead of me having to badger them for it. I am currently entitled to a "new" (read: refurb) machine because I've had so much repair work done on mine (twice to the shop).

While it certainly sucks that my laptop has had these problems to begin with, the fact that the service is there to back you up means I will be an Apple customer for some time yet.
Nutshell:

He's wrong about a lack growth potential in the US because a bunch of my friends have joined.

Another round wouldn't be dilutive because our last round was so overvalued.

And yeah internet advertising hasn't really worked internationally - but we'll be okay because we're beefing up our sales staff over there.

And he is wrong because we're not going to make revenue because it would be bad for the user experience. Revenues be damned! We can make it as long as we have a great user experience!
Betcha, Joe is an Ayn Rand groupie.
I don't know. I very rarely flag things. But today, for whatever reason, Hacker News seems flooded with extremely similar articles. Today is Gladwell Day. And this post didn't seem to be adding anything relevant to the conversation. I saw it as spam. But it's still here, so I guess my flag wasn't a good one.
My advice:

1) Do some contract work, just to build some cash, networking, and confidence. It can expose you to more different parts of the industry in 3 months than working in a big corporation ever will.

-- Search for gigs via personal contacts, craigslist, and then guru / scriptlance / rentacoder, in that order. The gigs get progressively worse as you work down that.

-- Although your former employer sounds like a shit place to work, and most people kind of glorify thier first real-world employer, feel free to hit them for contract work which YOU WILL DO FROM HOME. Emphasis on that last part. Charge them 3 times whatever your salary worked out to be previously; 2 times is standard, but if they fired you, stick it to them for 3.

2) There are plenty of places that hire coders with odd personal habits, sometimes far in excess of odd work hours. Apply to different places and mention your work hours in a cover letter. If you go through a couple of 1 month stands at places that don't work out, don't feel bad, you don't have to mention an employment period that short on your resume.

3) What do you actually expect to be that different about academia ? You can't be a student forever, so at some point you will be the equivalent of a freelancer in academia -- you will set your own hours, but your income will be largely determined by the grants you can pull in or what you produce for your professor. There are academic employers that can be as obnoxious about meeting times and etc as companies are, although they are less common. Finally, you are likely to embedded in a giant bureaucratic institution with many of the disadvantages of that, but lacking the security that traditionally comes from working in a really big corporation.

In reality, the age of big institutions is over -- if you work for a giant corporation, you still have to constantly re-apply for your job and fight for health care and have a substantial possibility of getting laid off because some MBA invested in CDOs. We are all freelancers now, but only some people realize it. That's a different post.

As a final observation, I would say that you seem to be pretty down emotionally right now, and even mild depression is often associated with weird sleep patterns. Consider the possibility that when your life doesn't suck as much, your sleep problems might be more manageable even if they are still there.

I would make a fairly simple list of goals, such as "this month I will make $300 from contracting on craigslist" and "this week I will apply to 5 companies that sound exciting" and try to hit them in a fairly disciplined way every day, even if "every day" means "every night". If you start hitting a few goals, you can at least build some forward momentum.
"Finally, deliberate practice is an effortful activity that can be sustained only for a limited time each day during extended periods without leading to exhaustion (effort constraint). To maximize gains from long-term practice, individuals must avoid exhaustion and must limit practice to an amount from which they can completely recover on a daily or weekly basis." (K. Anders Ericsson)

"A number of training studies in real life have compared the efficiency of practice durations rangingfrom 1-8 hr per day.These studiesshowessentiallyno benefit from durations exceeding 4 hr per day and reduced benefits from practice
exceeding 2 hr (Welford, 1968; Woodworth & Schlosberg, 1954). Many studiesof the acquisition oftyping skill (Baddeley & Longman, 1978; Dvorak et al.. 1936) and other perceptual-motor skills (Henshaw& Holman, 1930) indicate that the effective duration of deliberate practice may be closer to 1hr perday." (K. Anders Ericsson)

projects.ict.usc.edu/itw/gel/EricssonDeliberatePracticePR93.pdf
I disagree with "pompous" very much. Rand is many things, but she's very rarely pompous. She's quite down-to-earth.

She's great in that she's concise and accessible. She writes an incredible "gee-whiz" action story.

And, pardon me if this is off the mark, but I've noticed 4 accounts being made in the last hour, all of whom have the same attitude to this conversation, all of whom comment twice. Are these all throwaway accounts? I've never seen something like this happen on Hacker News before.
Sorry to hear that you aren't up to dealing with the hassles imposed by the Canadian tax systems. Perhaps you can offer a limited storage/bandwidth account free of charge to fellow Canucks. :) There aren't that many of us...
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agreed (skribit co-founder here.. been working on it for a year). just posted this yesterday about skribit's status:

http://paulstamatiou.com/2008/11/10/whats-going-on-with-skri...
Hai di sản văn hóa Việt Nam trở thành ''đại diện nhân loại''
Nasa Mars mission declared dead
Anomalies aren't necessarily evidence but in this case, and in many important general cases anomalies can be critically important evidence.

He and his career constitute evidence that "height" is not a requirement to be an elite basketball player. It's definitional and not arguable.

In science today's "anomaly" is sometimes the evidence that leads to tomorrow's breakthrough.
The necessary claim to make that assertion, as has been stated in several places here, is that Rand and Gladwell are opposites. There've been a few threads here discussing that in particular.

That claim is not backed up.

If I asked the question "Who is our savior: George Bush or Boy George?", then I would be making a specious claim: that either is a savior. Or, if I ask "Who is right: George Carlin or Lewis Black?", the specious claim is the two oppose themselves. In that case, my follow-up post to the question needs to explain exactly how the two oppose one another. In this case, there is somewhat of an argument to be made, but it's not one that the blog post makes.
I also find pouring over dotfiles .vimrc files uncovers many tricks I didn't know: http://dotfiles.org/.vimrc
Every Rand groupie I have ever met is a total nimrod.

Sorry.

It's true.
Rand doesn't view those of lesser productivity as "evil", assuming they aren't leaching off of others when they could be providing for themselves. She simply viewed them as uninteresting: they aren't the people changing the world. She was admittedly quite harsh in her judgement of what constituted "productive". She described the character of Eddie Willers in _Atlas Shrugged_ as "a typical man of mediocrity", and he was a top-level exec in a large railroad company!

It's too bad, really. There is so much good in her philosophy that gets obscured by her personnal flaws and her limited (and self-admitted) lack of understanding of human psychology. _The Fountainhead_ is a great novel, raw and bitter and steeped in human struggle as few books are. It has a dozen flaws, but it's still one of the greatest books I've ever read. There is a scene in it where Roark and Dominique discuss the chemical properties of the different kinds of marble. Boring right? It has to be one of the greatest extended allegories ever written. (TASTE the dialog there. Slippery silibants suggesting sly secrets of the soul.)
Many of these lunatic dictators were elected ( Mussolini, Hitler) and the others came to power from revolutions that promised a "people's democracy" ( the Bolsheviks, Mao, Pol Pot).

My take on the origins of World War I is quite different than yours. From my readings, the monarchs were much less willing to go to war than the politicians, and the politicians were less rabid than the mob. Britain, France, Germany, Austria, and Russia all had elected parliaments with universal manhood suffrage that voted for the war. The rise of universal suffrage in the late 1800's gave rise to a number of jingoistic newspapers and politicians. Imagine five powerful countries and all the sources of news were like Fox News - no NYTimes or NPR. That's the recipe for one of the worst wars in human history. Pre-democracy, the kings would fight a few battles and call it a day ( see the Franco-Prussian war of 1871). With a democracy, calling a truce was "giving in to the aggressor" and the war lasted four terrible years.

Some good books/articles on the subject: Liberty Or Equality ( http://blog.mises.org/archives/006326.asp ), The World of Yesterday by Stefan Zweig, Once an ArchDuke by Archduke Ferdinand, "Churchill on the Great War" - http://themonarchist.blogspot.com/2008/08/churchill-on-great..., Churchill, Hitler, and "The Unnecessary War"
Start figuring out how you're going to talk about this now, and use the blog to practice. This killed our first product too.

I'm not saying talk up serverside security; I'm saying, after allllllll that content about crypto algorithms, I'm still left wondering whether I can trust my data to your app. Most everyone else who talks about secure backup is going to leave it at "SSL, plus we encrypt the data on our servers". Your #1 feature is that you do the opposite, but all I see is RSA OAEP.

Also, I'm not saying downplay the crypto; I'm saying, reverse pyramid style, find a way to come up with a brand-y feature-y way to summarize (a) custom crypto, (b) open, auditable design, (c) freely available source code. Then use the crypto details to back that up (on a seperate page).

Dynamic updates: how do you update the tarsnap clientside software?

Consider a name other than tarsnap, too.
... also: congratulations. =)
Boston: Lock The Students Up
purchase order

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purchase_order
The SkylerNovak and Robert something accounts have been created only a couple hours ago. They're just trolling. I think you're being perfectly courteous and upmodded you accordingly.
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