skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've recently intentionally removed some of the hacks for making IE6 look sane in our apps. PNG transparency is the most obvious...so in IE6, our products have grey boxes around all the images. It still all works--nothing is impossible to do in IE6. It just looks stupid. This, of course, is the easiest thing to fix in IE6, so I'm still spending an inordinate amount of time making sure everything still works in IE6. But, it's my passive aggressive way to make it clear that IE6 is not an appropriate browser for modern applications.

I don't know that this does anything positive for the world, but it gives me a small piece of satisfaction. (Of course, IE6 is less than 5% of our users, so it's not really a revolutionary act.)
Oh, is it 850k FB app users? I thought they meant actual users of their site.
> VB6 is possibly the best environment for doing this ever, so I see where he's coming from.

The open-source descendant of Foxpro is Dabo:
http://www.dabodev.com

As easy as anything MS but with a real programming language (Python).
Newzbin subscription (or renewal)
I believe Gresham's Law, i.e. the principle that bad money drives out the good, is also applicable here. Employers aren't knowledgeable enough to evaluate the difference between a good and a bad programmer. Consequently, they pay only an average with a small variance.

One of the characteristics of a bad programmers is that they will say they are "done" when in fact they aren't or the quality is so poor that the schedule will ultimately slip. Employers are bad at judging internal code quality or correlating bugs with bad programmers.

In fact, at my old company, they actually gave bonuses to people who fixed the most bugs -- usally their own. They ended up rewarding programmers who made lots of bugs versus people who had solid code. Fortunately, such a reverse incentive program ended.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gresham%27s_law
Very nice write-up (although the submitted title is a bit misleading).

Regarding the twitter post he referenced–as a happy Engine Yard customer, I can testify that they've never tried to sell me anything. The only thing we've had to pay extra for is space (because we're growing).

I do have other RoR apps running at Slicehost with passenger. They work great but there is definitely a noticeable performance difference compared to our EY app. I think most of this has to do with how Apache is configured (the first time you hit the app, it's very slow as Rails is being fired up).

As long as EY is keeping up with best practices, that works for me.
I use the companies profiles on http://www.crunchbase.com and look in the left hand side under competitors.
This made me smile. I'm sure everyone who has built even a simple page has had the urge to break something after seeing their perfectly designed page in Firefox explode in IE6.

That said, you'll want to test on a small segment of your IE6 users before full implementation if possible. IE6 users are actually more qualified buyers a lot of the time depending on your industry. As a gross overgeneralization, IE6 users tend to pirate less, are less likely to be aware of competitors to your services, and might be more likely to be business customers at work depending on who you to sell to.
Should have clarified: according to them it's actual site users, but their FB apps are what drove the growth.

I can't believe I'm writing this, but I tend to agree with the sentiment reflected in the TC comments: something isn't right.

How can a site with so many users be dead everywhere else?

http://www.quarkbase.com/show/circleofmoms.com
So, that's why my wife gets pregnant so easy ...
You can also Cmd-click the document icon in the title bar of a document window (not the title, just the icon) and get a Finder-integrated dropdown with the same information.
That SVN repo was down, it's back now (5:30 PM PST).
Therefore, he is putting himself in a state where he is not a real man.

This is his logic, not mine.
Sed quis custodiet ipsos custodes? -- Juvenal (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quis_custodiet_ipsos_custodes)

This is a lovely idea, but suffers from a severe bootstrapping problem. How should the firm choose the technical person to hire? Or which consultants to use to recommend a technical person?

I have seen plenty of situations where the technical person onboard is second-rate -- or worse. I have also seen plenty of over-priced second-rate consultants.

IMHO part of the solution will be the eventual emergence of meaningful certifications of technical competence. Although problematic in a number of ways, the IEEE CSDP is probably a good first effort. Other professions are licensed, and have continuing education requirements.
Let's talk about Python 3.0
Ask YC: How much does your startup make per month?
How much does your startup make per month? Also describe services rendered, and what phase your startup is in.

EDIT: Consider startup in the loosest terms; this could be any passive income streams as well.
It's personal right now, I mean to privately archive the old content and start fresh. Once I get around to rebooting it, I'll self-promote by posting something here once I write something people might be interested in. Thanks for your interest, though!
Maybe 10x good developers don't get 10x pay because it takes teams to build high impact software, and the probability of anyone getting a team of all 10x good developers in the same room working on the same thing is low. (Assume something like 10x good developers at frequency 1:100 or 1:1000 in the population of all developers.)

It's hard for a company to realize the value from a 10x good developer, because their work is averaged with that of their 1x, 2x, 0.5x good teammates. Therefore the 10x good developer isn't worth much more than their more conventionally stellar 2x good colleagues; all he's doing is bumping up the average somewhat. The salary difference he commands is the the amount he bumps up the average.

Startups are more easily able to increase the concentration of 10x good developers, and that's where developers can make 10x+ money.
> When you're working with a large number of source files, the ability to have auto-complete, parameter guessing, getter/setter creation, auto-builders, and real-time code syntax/quality/checkstyle/pmd/findbugs/etc... validation means you can write working code more quickly.

I think his point is broader than that - he's arguing that IDEs encourage/are symptomatic of/cause bloat of the APIs and encourage bloat in other areas (e.g. generated code).

However, I think this article misses a trick by not mentioning functional programming.

FP reduces the surface area of many APIs considerably. It also "fixes" all the code generation issues with a much more elegant solution (i.e. macros).
IDEs appear to compensate for language design flaws which decrease productivity in the first place.
Try to remove your testing pages/comments:
http://www.chemsink.com/reaction_type/19/

Not sure how close you are to having real visitors, but test comments are never welcoming!
I bought TextMate back in early 2005, so was a pretty early user. I love it, but I use almost none of these advanced features. It's just a really solid text editor for me. I don't know the combinations for macros and what not and it's still worth the money :)
It's worth noting that Pratik wasn't throwing an attack at Engine Yard. Engine Yard is a special case amongst Rails hosts generally - it's expensive and for high end, heavy use.. you wouldn't expect EY to be doing the same sort of things mass market hosts would / should.

I think he was aiming more at shared / mass market hosts. For that level, it really would be next to crazy not to be using Passenger because it's so perfectly suited to that environment (and the other options are not).
Even so, I wouldn't want to write Lisp without at least paren matching.
Resurrect the dead pool & free the code
I'm not a fan of the design myself, and I'm surprised how effective a good design is.
I think you can do better.

I'd also hope that you could offer more than just links to the articles.

Maybe take a note from HackerNews, I'm sure there is tons of discussion that goes on regarding the topics and articles as the issues are extraordinarily complex.
I think that would be a solid value add.

What I think you have failed to do (or failed to tell us) is why people would visit your site over say TreeHugger.com, or others (I'm sure they exist, but I'm not super enviro-guy, so I don't know them all).

I'm under the impression that drudge focuses on slightly out of mainstream news coverage, but I could be wrong.

No doubt there is a huge market for what you are linking too, but from what I see, you are not yet offering me enough reason to come to you as a source.

Just my 2 cents.
Google Software Update sneaks its way onto computers
The issue seems to come down to trust. How can you trust any third party to be acting in your best interest?

The situation comes up anywhere where you don't have domain knowledge of the project. I've seen several people get burned by shody contractors, plumbers, mechanics, ect. It strikes me like finding a competent and honest development team reduces to the same problem.

Unfortunately, in this era of outsourcing and globalization it seems significantly more difficult to find a local development shop that someone can personally recommend.
Sometimes thinkgeek.com has interesting stuff.
re: crashing on change of color themes. he's probably using the new-ish cocoa-fied emacs in the 24 branch. It's still a bit buggy. Use the carbon build from 23 or just look for a diff if you really want to use 24.
Ah, my bad, they're not laying off interns, I got a full-time offer after concluding my internship.
The net result of the 3.0 generalizations is that Python 3.0 runs the pystone benchmark around 10% slower than Python 2.5. Most likely the biggest cause is the removal of special-casing for small integers. There’s room for improvement, but it will happen after 3.0 is released! </quote> http://docs.python.org/3.0/whatsnew/3.0.html
Amen. It's going to be a huge pain the ass to convert stuff, but worth it for a much needed language "cleansing."
What's wrong with Aquamacs? I've used both, but Aquamacs has been more stable, is easier to install, and seems to be updated more oftne.
For parsing XML responses? lxml is better than BeautifulSoup in terms of performance and memory usage.
Actually, Cocoa Emacs is in the 23 (development) branch and Carbon is in 22. Cocoa Emacs definitely has some rough edges. Personally, I use Carbon/GNU Emacs from:

http://aquamacs.org/nightlies.shtml
The Drudge Report's biggest selling point is its immediacy.

Unfortunately, the awesome level of immediacy that Drudge reaches isn't needed away from the general news, celeb news, and politics theater.
I like using GNU Emacs for portability. There are rock-solid nightly .dmgs on the Aquamacs development page.
The beat always goes on :) There are so many avenues to skip down. Three dimensional chips, a total rethink on what a microprocessor is, die size increases, moving into quantum computing...

We can be assured of one thing. The semiconductor industry is never going to become boring.
heh. yes, they should, but I hope they don't. When they started (I was accepting customers before they were) they beat my prices soundly. I was able to lower prices to slightly below ec2 probably a year ago, and now, my prices are about half amazon.com.

Really, though, I don't think of it as lowering prices. I think of it as giving the customer more resources for the same price. The cost of ram and cpu (both capital costs, and recurring power costs) per unit is dropping rather fast, while the per-account overhead (a big deal for me, because my provisioning system sucks. probably less of a big deal for amazon.) remains about the same.
I didn't know there was an updated version over thanksgiving. Heck I didn't know that it had been updated at all in a year. You might need to select the "cutting edge" option in prefs though.
Myth 1: solar power is too expensive to be of much use

I think that if there's one technology that's going to go crazy this century, it'll be solar power. We're so close to being able to harness the sun's energy efficiently (of which several hundred watts-worth can be hitting a square meter per hour), and when it becomes possible, it'll be more game changing than the proliferation of the telephone or the Internet.

Imagine.. next-to-free power almost anywhere on the planet at almost any time (assuming battery technology keeps up too). All sorts of crazy de-salinization, carbon extraction, and similar plans would become possible.
Because as we all know, "clean" code outsells "working" code every time.
From a comment in the article:

> 3.0 is 10% slower because of the change from ints to longs. If you read it carefully, they mention that there is space for improvement, but they want to have it out so people can start to use and see the differences. Release early, release often (and it took 3 years to get there, so better do this once and for all.)
Wait, why was this downmodded? You don't think this would have worked as a meme pre-election?
Not sure why there's so much complaining going on here

It's more like nitpicking. We like the general idea, and it would be ill of us not to critique it and make it better.
Wages are not effected by leverage or productivity. Productivity only matters when figuring out how many laborers you should hire. Leverage is just a weird way of masking the fact that higher paid workers are in low supply and high demand. Leveraging can only exist in instances where supply is low and demand is high!

1) The supply and demand of labor determines wages.

2) The factors that determine where you might lie on the demand curve for labor are: skill level, education, experience, reputation, etc.

3) The higher up the Demand curve, these factors become in shorter supply because it is hard to level up in real life. (MMO reference, sorry.)

4) The higher the demand of skills, experience, reputation, education, etc. >>> the lower the supply of labor will be >>> the higher wages will be.
they aren't at the party until textmate has a turing-complete programming language built in. It has a while to go.
Electraflyer.com
One of the main problems is that the blue box under the title is non editable, but it looks like it is.

I spent a while trying to work out what I was doing wrong until I read through the comments here.

I like the idea. Micro-services can really work. Look at Twitter :)
Emacs: Rectangular selection. A complete superset of that functionality. Check out the C-x r --- key combos.

Inserting in a rectangle: C-x r t
Deleting in a rectangle: C-x r d

and more...
TrafficFlow - Yahoo's answer to Mechanical Turk
Sorry I'll remove that color :)
I don't have textmate, but I have must-know-the-answer syndrome. I'm guessing it rkcnaqf gb gur yberz vcfhz grkg. (rot13) Can you confirm?
How do you generate passive income?
Online? Real estate? Investing?
Good idea... I'm considering open-sourcing the app that I've been working on and now (more than likely) abandoning.
I write Mac & iPhone software: http://www.wonderwarp.com
Thx for the links. I've pinged the pkg-ruby-extras mailing list for help too.
They're trying to prove a very different point in that study; notably that for developers working on distributed architectures that it's faster to solve most problems with Erlang than C++. That's a very different sort of conclusion than saying that the best programmers write the most code.

I think the only reasonable metric is someone's portfolio. You wouldn't pick an architect by how many nails they'd used or a musician by how many notes they'd written. You have to look at what they've actually done.

And in fact, that's pretty close to what good hiring is about. You then see if real performance matches up to what's in the portfolio.
I'm very curious to know how much "brand name" programmers like Peter Norvig or Guido van Rossum get paid. There are many Python programmers, but there is only one Guido, and many places that want him. I'm guessing I'll never find out, though.

Anders Hejlsberg got a $3 million signing bonus from Microsoft when he left Borland.

http://delphi.about.com/od/delphifornet/a/conspiracydnet_2.h...
Does watching TV make us dumber? Video games? Questions like this don't have an answer but can be an interesting discussion.

I guess I consider emacs ad IDE (or at the very least toolkit to build a personalised IDE). What about smalltalk? I don't think most would think of that as "dumbing things down" yet it really invented all the good things that IDEs have ?
Hacking on your own can be fun, but no matter what it is,
projects really take the fuck off when a few heads are
working together. That’s how you get explosive momentum. No
matter how smart or driven you are, you cannot do it alone.

Groups help give explosive momentum, sure, but when it comes to starting projects or making bold developments, nah. I'm thinking of the precendents set with, say, Linus Torvalds and Linux, Matz and Ruby, or DHH and Rails. It takes the dictatorial "I'm making all the decisions and getting this to the next step" approach to really get a project going. Big shifts require hunkering down too - when Parrot and Perl 6 started, there were so few people involved, but they really kicked it off.

Of course, the open source world has proven that once you reach a point where you have something useful and not too experimental, it can only improve under the influence of others :)
Realestate (in the past), interest (boring), dividends (yes some companies still pay !).

booring... I like the iphone answer better ;) Wish that was me !
Google Adsense used to be a really big deal for me. It's dropped in the last month or two though.

Site / blog sponsorships. I'm not talking text link ads but actual sponsorships from key companies in my sector. It's not big money but enough for me to spend my time working on what I want rather than what I have to.

In the past, I had revenue generating webapps, but I sold those in order to build some capital for future projects, savings, etc. I should probably get on to building another to be fair..

Oh, some low-maintenance Web hosting and domain registrations too for ultra old Web design clients (when I did that sort of thing). Keeps the servers paid up for me to use for my own stuff :)
online with http://uploadthingy.com - not totally passive - new users sometimes need some help - but once they're subscribed - well, they're subscribed.
Some of the occurrences here could explain "out of body" experiences, the reported loss of connection during rage, and similar slightly paranormal events. It seems the brain is not quite as connected to our bodies as we'd expect..
Google Update is indeed very sneaky. Its installation piggybacks on plenty of Google software (including browser plugins) without telling anything and then it installs a task into Windows Scheduler that keeps respawning it when you kill it.
Because you don't have a time machine, and you do have features to build.
Hey, what are some good iPhone development resources, I really want to get into this sort of thing for shits 'n giggles. Oh and make some bucks on the side
It's a red herring. Py3k is deliberately not a production runtime; it's the "developers and students" release Jens said GvR+co should have released instead of Py3k. Crudding the runtime up with performance hacks would cost more than they'd be worth.

The Ruby comparison Jens makes is exceedingly disingenuous; Ruby 1.9 is a runtime upgrade, not a major language update. Improving performance is mostly the point of it. And even then, there are areas of Ruby that remain controversial, like the threading model.
> I thought he was complaining more about the excessive complexity of modern computing environments

There was definitely that, too, but I'm much less sympathetic to that point. The .net libraries, like java before them, are gratuitously baroque.
What, specifically, are the areas in Py3k that you use regularly as a web developer that are faster in Py3k than they were in Python 2.5?
Why I can't use Emacs, a shameless rant
I wanted to like Jens' article, as a fellow Rubyist who had left a few 10klocs of Python in his wake. But I thought this was really weak. Instead of coming across like genuine tough questions, I think Jens wears his bias on his shoulder, even commenting that he's been "tipped more towards Ruby" by this "fork in the community" (a particularly funny comment from a Rubyist).

His worst argument: a comment that claims he's worried that Py3k will get security fixes that Python 2.6 won't --- a borderline-irresponsible cheap shot.

It's too bad, because I actually agree with his assessment; I get a whiff of "second-system syndrome" from this whole Py3k project, and the idea of breaking random bits of code in an interpreted, dynamically typed language and then fixing them with a code translator seems like lunacy.
But if nobody ever cleans up, you end up with a horrible place to be.
He uses jQuery.

The site doesn't work (Windows, Chrome).
Hopefully me too :)

http://puzzlemeapp.com

Good resources: Apple Documentation, especially the sample projects; http://ericasadun.com/ especially her cookbook; #iphonedev on freenode.net
Was the drop due to adsense payouts dropping over the last month, or something else?
Apple has a whole developer center with forums, etc, and their documentation is really good too.

If you want something more general / third party, though, check out http://www.mobileorchard.com/ - it's a site I'm involved with, but we try to be objective.. (pun semi-intended ;-)) We cover higher level stuff mostly. Lists of resources, sites to check out, etc.
I don't think this article has aged well:

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html

because it chose a really bad example. But the points it makes are where I'm coming from too. "Cleanliness" is highly overrated.
Very cool idea. I would suggest linking to chemical suppliers. I don't know if Sigma-Aldrich and the like have online stores, but that would be a very easy way to monetize this idea.
SEO consulting. It's actually sort of funny how little work I do relative to how much people will pay for it.
the other thing is that it needs to be constantly updated.
What I found useful when messing around with iPhone stuff was the pragprog iPhone SDK book, Erica Saudin's iPhone developers cookbook and just reading Apple's documentation on the subject I was working on.

If you want more mac side of things then iPhone, then i can't say enough good things about Aaron Hillegass' Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X book.
no clue what it is or what it does
I'm not sure there is such a thing as completely passive income. Wealthy investors (think China, Saudi Arabia, and Japan) have a lot of money (say 70 trillion) and thousands of people trying to allocate it efficiently. They don't do so well. Why would you?

Also, my understanding is that real interests rates are currently negative. On top of it all, the combination of a nominal capital gains tax and inflation means you lose ((inflation * .15) * your net worth) every year in this manner, at least if you are a US citizen. In light of all this, perhaps you should consider spending money on your intellect; it's not taxed, and it has some degree of liquidity. Alternatively, buy a cheap foreclosed house and rent it out; that may be profitable right now.
> Site / blog sponsorships.

How does that work, exactly? Do you mean, you put links on your page to those other key companies and then get paid per click?
I don't. With real estate and investing, a decade of growth can get wiped out in 1 week. No stability whatsoever. Sure its fine to play with a disposable amount and hope for a win, but just like Vegas, you have to approach it with willingness to lose everything.

Oh and I don't mean that first house, as an investment....I mean that 2nd and 3rd you buy, hoping to make a few hundred K in a couple of years.

So for passive, you gotta go with something safe. Stuff like gov't bonds etc. Because otherwise you are pretty much guaranteed to lose a ton of money.
Do you have java? It looks like it's an applet.