skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As far as I'm concerned they're talking about two orthogonal subjects, and I think it takes a bit of cloudy thinking to conflate the two.

Rand never posited that people are born productive. Productive people are productive by virtue of doing things, in Ayn's world...while a lot of other people are envious of the doing and stand in their way. People can become productive. Individualism requires that people can do whatever it is they want to do, as long as it doesn't harm another. Rand wasn't talking about what childhood occurrences make for a Galt or a Roarke. Perhaps she believed they were pre-destined, but I can't think of a single instance where that was indicated in her writing (and I went through a two year Rand phase in college...I've read just about everything she ever wrote). And certainly not in Atlas Shrugged or The Fountainhead.

Gladwell, on the other hand, is saying that people we view as stars in their field are sometimes given a more obvious path to becoming stars than others, and thus things society does can help or hinder people who would be productive. I don't think Rand would argue that there aren't people in the world who can help you as well as people in the world who can hinder you.

Note that I'm not making any judgment call on either idea. I'm just not seeing how anyone could come away thinking this article is a useful addition to the subject (or subjects, in this case, since there are two under discussion, and somehow the author believes they contradict one another). I agree with others that this is blogspam, making use of hot button names like Gladwell and Rand. It's almost as if they have a machine that churns out high hit ideas...
"2. Taxes: Every dollar you take out of LLC is salary (and subject to payroll taxes). In an S-Corp, any money you take out of the business after paying yourself a "normal" salary is a distribution and free of payroll tax."

--> That one is HUGE in favor of S-Corp over LLC. That's 7% on all income over whatever you can justify as your base salary. If a company is going to be small-ish and profitable for a while, S-Corp is worth a few thousand dollars each year at the cost of added paperwork. LLC has more flexibility, but S-Corp can do all the same things if you don't mind filling out more documents and maybe thinking about it a bit more.
No flicker at all, it seems to run pretty smoothly thus far.
Rand's vilification of people who disagree with her is irritating, but what's more troublesome is the victim mentality that goes along with it. Inevitably the protagonist (who is handsome, smart, determined, and surprisingly domineering in the bedroom) is held back by the mediocrity of the masses. If only circumstances were different, the books tell us over and over again, our hero could achieve his true potential.

This, to me, is a cop-out. Most proponents of Objectivism never make something excellent, they just talk a lot about how they could, maybe, if only things were different. Or, in an amusing variation, they can just declare themselves to have achieved excellence (Ayn Rand once declared herself "the best writer today") in spite of the opposition.

Both of these approaches seem to sidestep the very real challenges of making something great and enduring. While I think the comparison to Gladwell is apples to oranges, I much prefer his attempts to quantify what make someone exceptional to Rand's ineffable "greatness".
Excellent, but you missed adding some goodies that would really make this stand out.

1. Add a webpage icon to the app.
2. Enable standalone status, so the app launches fullscreen instead of in Safari.

More info:

https://developer.apple.com/webapps/docs/documentation/Apple...
I used iUI (http://code.google.com/p/iui/). There's a patch for smoother transitions somewhere in there that I've planning to put in.
This is actually fascinating.

I'm not totally surprised by these numbers (350 million messages, only 28 sales), but I am glad to see that there are people out there actually attempting to figure out what the true numbers are (as opposed to the tens of millions of dollars myth). Based on what the story says, spammers are potentially earning about $2 million a year. I suppose larger spammers could be earning 3 - 4x that (so, $6 - 8 million), and this obviously isn't chump change.

This study points out what we already know, though: there is a problem with email. The barrier to entry is too low which is both a blessing and a curse. It allows people communicate with ease, but it also allows people to send millions or billions of emails at little or no cost to them. Now, I know that these are hijacked computers, but the point remains that since it is so easy and cost-efficient to send email, it becomes profitable at virtually any scale because of the non-existent cost.

I'm not saying that we should charge for every email, since that may not be a viable solution (though it could work), but there does need to be something done besides continuously improving our spam filters.

Also, isn't the methodology used by the researchers technically illegal?

"The team used these machines to control a total of 75,869 hijacked machines and routed their own fake spam campaigns through them."
It's led to a good discussion although a few people have gotten over-heated.
I like the name - pretty clever
Electric is significantly more efficient than diesel-electric only when the diesel-electric has to do a lot of braking. (Electrics have regenerative braking, so stopping one train can be used to power another.) That means either lots of stops or hills; a train going down can power a train going up.

While trains spend a lot of money on fuel, it isn't a big fraction of their costs, so even free fuel can't make a huge difference in total train costs.

Moreover, electrification is very expensive. It's so expensive that electrification plan for the CalTrain corridor (San Jose to San Francisco), which is pretty much a best-case for electrification due to the frequent stops, doesn't mention cost-savings as a reason. They'll probably never recover the capital costs.

Electrification might pay for itself over the Rockies, but it's a loss throughout much of the US.

Since fuel-savings is pure profit, the freight-train companies are very motivated and constantly look at these things.
The article misses that Rand's books are romantic, whereas Gladwell is a journalist. Rand writes fiction; Gladwell writes theories based on anecdotes and statistics. For an analogy, that'd be a lot like saying "Pablo Piccasso, or xyz modern photographer: Who is right?"

Not sure what profession has to do with a comparison of beliefs.
Have you considered looking at the price comparison sites? Some of them have an API. Unless you plan to compete with them directly, you will save a lot of time.

Example: http://developer.yahoo.com/shopping/
I was mostly commenting on the fluff at the start of the article about calling the election at 9:48 EST.
Maybe it's just me, but I don't find that huge variety of boring things to do at the local gym appeals to me. You know what it took for me to get off my ass and actually exercise a little? Wii Fit.
Agreed. My first thought reading this was "what kind of horrid company has daily developer meetings at 8:45 AM?"
IF-MAP in Security Appliance- Chris Hoff
Not a problem. Glad you enjoy it :)
I wish ycombinator will be one day that elegant
Programming is writing. It's not just writing. One can think of many great writers who would have made lousy programmers.
When I started getting in to coding and started focusing on refactoring, it amused me how close that was to the process of writing poetry (at least the way I was taught). Write it all out. Then cut some, add less, cut some more, move some things around.
"As for the article being garbage, I appreciate where the author is coming from, but it's not insightful enough to warrant a link. Not to say it won't stir up the Objectivists here a whole lot."

The article has value in that it's stirred up an examination of Positivism. Too many college kids get all caught up in this nonsense. Then the join the Republican Party as a result.
No. But similarly, there's more that interests the average hacker than programming and programming articles. I tend not to find the programming articles as interesting, actually.

There's an equilibrium here. Some weeks we get lots of programming articles and nothing else. Some weeks we get only Linux articles, or only Google articles. Some weeks we get a lot of "off topic" stuff.

So far things haven't gotten too out-of-hand. I think things are still ticking along pretty nicely.
Wow, this is just a horrible explanation of why Arrington is (supposedly) wrong.

He does not refute or offer clarification on the money burn. Instead, he cites the user growth rate, but at what cost do those users come? Should we somehow assume that every new user has an immediate positive value?

The 15bn valuation number is also an often mentioned fallacy. For their money, Microsoft got some Facebook stock and some advertising impressions. No one has ever really clarified how much of Microsofts $275m went to stock and how much went to advertising.
Rand never made her sociological understanding of how people become productive explicit because she sort of didn't have any. That's what enables her to view the highly productive and the less productive (or unproductive or even counterproductive) as good and evil, respectively. If she actually understood the subtle forces at work, she wouldn't have been so quick to judge.
Announcing Django Crawler and django-test-utils
I won't get into all of this argument - it's a good one, and I'm enjoying reading it - but Ayn Rand does one thing that very few other people do: she admits outright what her works are. She never pretends to teach anything other than Objectivism. And while her thoughts are flawed, she has an ability to take complex thoughts and make them easy to follow. Atlas Shrugged is absolutely worth a read.

Ironically, your saying that you don't like Rand because other people don't like her is going along with the very principle that Rand most stands against. Make your own opinions, based on your own logic. Don't follow what other people say. Read it yourself and decide.
Their books are still expensive. College student should buy international versions for around $20. Abebooks.com has tons of them.
This all seems a bit confusing and the article didn't help clear things up. Did we actually give the Fed $2 trillion to loan or did they just create the money?
Make it a way to meet new people, network, socialize, and get fit at the same time.

But the question then is whether pacefit is worth paying for. Personally I've done exactly that at Curves without having to pay a "middleman" like pacefit to make it happen.

Maybe the appeal is meeting up with other geeks, but I do that all the time, and I don't know if that's the best matchup of people to go working out together. At Curves at least I know all the equipment and fitness programs are designed with women in mind. But how would you match up people online, even if they live in the same geographical area? You'd have a hodgepodge of gym memberships, interests, abilities, goals and more.
Bookmarked, nicely done.
I'm not sure the gigantic speech at the end of Atlas Shrugged is merely about getting you to "wonder" if some change is in order. Rand wrote exactly what she thought you should think.
Quick, someone help this man! His humor has stopped!
IPlayer for Mac Coming This Month
How To Be Fucking Awesome
Just curious...have you ever tried marijuana? Did it affect your sleeping?
I've been using this from my iPhone for a few weeks after stumbling upon it from your profile page.

Thought it was public knowledge or I would've submitted it myself! =]
I don't disagree with that. It doesn't alter the fact that the author of the article manages to misunderstand a lot of things, and then presents it as useful discourse. I just wanted to call out that cloudy thinking. It's a pet peeve.
This argument came up on reddit. I think the reason this happens is that there's a certain mindset that says that absolute truth is extremely simple, and that deviance from that truth is a black-and-white affair. On Hacker News, we see mostly the atheist side of this black-and-white spectrum: the sort that denies religion any benefit, and which denounces people who disagree as insidious and festering.

That mindset appeals to programmers, in part because it's a very lazy mindset that allows you to quickly judge complex things and focus on the very specific thing that you care to focus on. It's the same mindset that encourages blind libertarianism. The problem with it is that it discourages intellectual discussion and leads to flame wars. That's what brought reddit down: a mass of people who were willing to instantly denounce people, and who led to a very hive-mind situation.
I thought you may be interested in reading some of the bullet points contained in this post: http://merbist.com/2008/11/09/merb-1-0-released/

We can all live as one. It doesn't have to be "Merb versus Rails". It doesn't have to be a war.
Sun to Distribute MSN Toolbar with Java
Here we are rehashing silly debates about Ayn Rand instead of discussing the ideas contained in the original article.
I think Atwood is missing the bigger picture that both writing and programming are forms of creating. They are both textual, sure, but they fall better under this bigger umbrella of design.

So I wouldn't say coding is just writing, they just both happen to involve text.
But fools take it literally.
Startup Insights from Dharmesh Shah - In Video
Now it's time to redesign the actual Hacker News site.
Why do people on HN discuss the title, and not the content? The average discussion on reddit/programming (for example) is now of higher quality than HN these days, for the same story - and with less oneupmanship.

To me, the interesting thing about this story isn't the presentation of the thesis (using Ayn Rand), but to question the thesis itself: Is success more circumstantial than personal? http://nymag.com/arts/books/features/52014/index6.html

The hockey player example creates a subset of advantaged people (i.e. those born nearer the start of the year), for which evidence is claimed.

I'm not sure about the "rice fields" causation, but I have observed, and it's well known that students who are culturally asian study harder. But again, "asian students" is a subset of all students.

In contrast, Bill Gates and the Beatles are subsets of one each. What about all the other bands who played Hamburg (Ringo wasn't there anyway)? Was there a wave of "Hamburg" bands?

And what about all the other kids who had a computer lab - for one thing, Bill wasn't the only kid in that school.

Circumstance (obviously) can provide providential assistance - though it's worth noting that the aid given in all the above cases was not a gift, but more work. And I certainly agree with that - skill comes from practice.

It might be that your potential is set at birth; and there is nothing you can do about it - you cannot affect it in the slightest, no matter what you do or how hard you try. But there is no way of knowing what that potential is... except by practicing as hard and as long as these guys did and finding out.
I have this book. It's a decent introduction to the subject.
I know it's fun mocking the Geniuses, but they've always given me pretty excellent service. The name's kind of ridiculous, but don't knock a good thing.
Rand's vilification of people who disagree with her is irritating, but what's more troublesome is the victim mentality that goes along with it. Inevitably the protagonist (who is handsome, smart, determined, and surprisingly domineering in the bedroom) is held back by the mediocrity of the masses. If only circumstances were different, the books tell us over and over again, our hero could achieve his true potential.
-

Hence the blogger's comment:

"Atlas Shrugged is a similar story. In it a group of scientists and tycoons decide in equally petulant fashion that they will "simply take their ball and go home", when society refuses to capitulate to their capricious demands. So what happens? 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."

Yes, in real life others would have stepped up to the plate.
If it were found that people are more or less productive/successful based on the amount of iron in their diets during early childhood they would both be proven wrong (this example is strictly for illustration).

I believe that there are many contributing factors and possible paths to productivity and success (as well as many ways to measure both).
That's a piss poor analysis, to be frank.

First, let's be honest: Facebook's problem is that it spends more on each user than it receives. In other words, its current operating P&L sheet is negative. That cannot possibly be disputed, unless there is some magical fairy dust that generates ad-revenue many magnitudes greater than the norm.

It's really irrelevant whether you believe that it costs Facebook $100M a month to operate, as Arrington seems to, or whether you figure FB can get by on a $1M a month shoestring budget. The fact remains that, regardless the numbers of users, per capita there is negative revenue generated.

Arrington argues that increasing the number of users, while not solving the per capita loss, hastens the use of those capital reserves of $500M. On this point, he is exactly correct. It's basic math. The rest is just semantics.

They need to solve the problem that revenue on a per user basis is a negative number. Not only do they need to make that number positive, they need to bring it into the black far enough that they can pay back their $500M in borrowed money, and give some sort of return. They need to do this before any of their current (or future) sources of funding collapse. This is a very tough problem to solve. (BTW, google was in this position once)

My humble opinion is that they won't be able to do this anytime soon, and will most likely fail in the future. As much as they laugh at the ad-driven screenshot in the article, that's probably what FB will look like in due time.

I'm just going with the odds. Outside of Google, I don't know of any company that's been able to come up with the last minute Hail Mary business plan.
Are macs really that crappy?
Okay, gotcha.
Thanks for the answer, but you only cite one advantage, that of flexibility. Surely there must be others?
The point of the blog is the question: do the successful at least part of their success to the society they grew up in.

Ayn Rand says no; Gladwell says yes.
No games. If your normal salary is $100,000 and you want to distribute $1,000,000, that's where this comes into play. And the limit is only on a portion of the FICA taxes (it's actually $100k).

More clearly, the business pays social security tax of 6.2% of each of its employees' salaries up to $100k and medicare tax of 1.45% of each of its employees' salaries with no limit. So, if you take $1,000,000 from the business in a year and $100,000 is your normal salary, Then the business would pay $20,700 in FICA tax under an LLC and $7,650 under an S-Corp.
MySpace, yes. It came from a very corporate background. But Facebook really did start as a small little network for Harvard people that spread like mad. (I think if Zuckerberg had really been out to make a billion dollars with Facebook, he'd have been much better prepared with an advertising solution than he was. Considering how good the Facebook team is with innovating and expanding themselves, advertising dropped the ball - I think because they didn't prepare any solutions ahead of time.)

The "friends list" is exactly what I dislike about such systems. Especially on Facebook, where systems already exist to handle such systems benevolently. I don't think that counts as SEO, though, since there's nothing SEO to putting a page on a private network. That opposed to Twitter, where some people link to every single blog post they write to boost their link status. (Then again: I don't understand Twitter and probably never will.)
The Asians - hard work - rice explanation is a bit cutesy.

In what recently underdeveloped nation do people NOT work like mules? Where in the developing world do parents NOT push their kids hard to study?

China, India, All of Eastern Europe?

There's nothing magical about rice.
I have always found Gladwell's work to be interesting, but he suffers severely from confirmation bias. His pieces seem like very well laid out hypotheses with a lot of biased support and no further development nor testing. But again, they are interesting and great conversation starters.

I strongly recommend voting up the original article so that we may refocus the discussion (I did not submit it):

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=359511
So according to Malcolm Gladwell I need to be Chinese to be good at math and because I was born in the later half of the year I am not good at sports therefore I am good at computers.

Man these guys have it all figured out. Bunch of shit both of them. Know why Bill Gates succeeded? Cause he worked hard. Know why Chinese kids do better in Math? Cause they usually start from nothing, parents come over here start a new life and tell them to work hard to make it. Cause of the Chinese tradition of strong family the kid listens.

People who start from the bottom work harder to get out, people who start at the top sit around and do nothing until they've been passed up.

These are of course generalizations of a majority of these social groups.
You're not making the debate any smarter with your strawman. Last I checked "some" is not a synonym of "all".
Okay, here's a situation I've run into: I want to create a web frontend to an existing library. Naturally, the existing library already has some nice model-like classes that I'll be working with.

What I'd like to do is take those model-like classes and persist them to the database. It should just be a simple matter of mapping a few instance variables / attributes to database columns right? Well, it turns out this is fairly difficult with ActiveRecord. Firstly, ActiveRecord wants all your models to extend ActiveRecord::Base. But, I already have an existing class and the chances are I don't want to, or can't, change the existing class to extend AR::Base.

So maybe I'll to create an ActiveRecord model that will wrap and delegate to the existing class. Ah, but AR::Base has a huge footprint and uses so much magic that it's downright painful to do delegation. You can't safely use method_missing because AR::Base does, and you're almost guaranteed to have a conflict where AR::Base and your existing class define the same methods anyway.

Here's how DataMapper is different: You're not required to extend any sort of base class. Instead, you mixin a module with a tiny footprint. So, in your web frontend, you can open the existing model-like class, mixin DataMapper::Resource, and map your properties to columns. Because the footprint for DataMapper::Resource is so light, and it doesn't use any magic, it's unlikely we'll break the existing class. Even if we do break it with this approach, we're far more likely to succeed with delegation that we are under ActiveRecord.

So, to bring it back to Merb and Rails, here's the key difference: ActiveRecord might be just fine for most projects. But, maybe DataMapper is sometimes better. Or, maybe another ORM is. In any case, Merb will let me work with whatever library I think is best for my project. Rails give you no choice. You either take the whole stack as is or you don't.

And, that doesn't just apply to the ORM layer. The same can be said for template engines and javascript libraries.
I'm almost done with a same-domain bookmarklet that reformats HN for the iPhone within the browser. No 3rd party sites will be required, and you can interact with your account completely from the site.