skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"spending trillions, whether its for cleaner energy, or buying iPhone fart apps, _is_ an economy. Nothing is "lost"."

True, and False.
Yes, it is the economy, but saying nothing is lost is debateable. Simple mental experiment....consider a few scenarios of projects society could undertake in a year:

a) Spend $500 Billion developing several different versions of iPhone Fart applications
b) Spend $500 Billion dropping bombs on any arbitrary country
c) Spend $500 Billion on having holes dug in the ground by one crew, and then filled up by another crew
d) Spend $500 Billion installing solar/wind power infrastructure using the currently most efficient technology we have
e) Spend $500 Billion building plants to manufacture a variety of useful products

In each case, it is perfectly true that we have a $500 Billion economy, but if you look at your balance sheet at the end of the year, there most definitely would be differences.
oh come on!! Do I have to put little smiley faces next to ever piece of humor ;). There, maybe I should end all my sentences that way ;).

I am very well aware that everyone on HN knows that quote and that it was mis-referenced. The fact that it was ref'd to DHH just added some humor. And some of my closest friends have referred to me delusional at times... I take it as a compliment ;) There, more smileys for you ;)
Good management is a very, very difficult skill. I've tried managing small teams (4-6 people, usually non-technical or semi-technical volunteers) and I basically sucked at it. It's much, much harder than programming.

Of course, any manager who reaches for "project management or solution modeling" has basically failed already.
Android for Netbooks not on the Horizon for Google
Technically yes, but actually no.
The conventional definition of "programmer" may be narrowly defined, but under no circumstances would I expand it to include the careers of Bill Gates, Joel Spolsky or your average "technology pundit". Those people may have written software at one point (and may still occasionally write code), but programming didn't make them famous.

To define people like Steve Jobs as "programmers" is to so absurdly broaden the definition of the word, as to make it meaningless. After all, Steve Jobs once studied calligraphy (and even credited his studies for the development of the Macintosh!) -- should we label him a calligrapher? He makes music industry deals -- is he a musician? He buys rights to feature films -- is he a producer? He headed up Pixar -- is he an animator?

I think there are good career opportunities in the technology industry, but for the most part, these careers don't involve programming. Your examples are telling: if you want to become a venture capitalist or a CEO or a "technology pundit", then you're far better off knowing a little bit about code, and a lot about money, business or journalism (respectively), than vice-versa. Coding is assembly line work -- which is why our society tried to outsource it to cheaper labor as soon as it became feasible to do so. We don't outsource the jobs that we value.
I am looking for a start-up for the all the reasons that PG and other experienced entrepreneurs give for having at least one co-founder.

I am building the prototype on my own, but I would like to have a co-founder to assist with version 1.0, and with the non-technical aspects of a startup.
that's a good one too. thanks. The quote I'm looking for, I know I read in 1995 or maybe before.
No. The article is confusing the christmas bonus (usually $1k from what I've heard) with the annual bonus handed out in February (which is normally 15% of salary).

I agree that replacing an expected $1k with a mobile phone on short notice is likely to come as a bit of a shock to many Googlers, but this is nowhere near as much of a shock as replacing the 15% annual bonus would be.
Writing articles that seem to be well thought through. Although I, sometimes, find myself opposing his views, I have to say that they are always interesting. "If two people think the same , one of them is not needed". So we do need writers who bring a different point of view. I think that is what he does with his writings.
For the same reason we make ethanol from corn: politicians, and redistribution of money. In both politics and economics, facts are almost entirely irrelevant today. I don't watch much TV, but when I watch the news, I could absolutely destroy any politician or economist that they bring on their shows. Their "facts" are generally half truths or outright false, and their logic is full of textbook fallacies. Although, it is quite interesting watching some of the good ones, how skillfully they can transition an answer to a question to one of their talking points, and appear to answer the interviewer question. I honestly can't blame joe sixpack for being so clueless if they get their information from TV news.
That almost makes me want to rethink my mac usage.
Wow, finally my Ph.D. thesis work has an application! ;)
If DHH decided to tweak Alan Kay's quote (changing "invent" to "implement") and attribute it to himself, well

who cares? Life is short. Choose your battles wisely.
I agree. I'm getting better by leaps and bounds every month ( I have been programming full time for about 3 years). I'm excited by how much I will know in 10 years. It is weird that you don't see a lot of really good programmers in their 40's and 50's I could see how, if I continue growing like I am now, most programming jobs I know of would be an easy coast. Why don't people do that.

This is going to come off as pompous, but I wonder if its just that you don't see a lot of nerdy hackers continuing into their 40's. I can think of a bunch of programmers from DC who were in their 40's and 50's , they were mostly government workers and enterprise type programmers, I doubt those types continue pushing and exploring.
Approval of Kishen-Ganga project to widen Indo-Pak chasm
> What's the biggest conflict you've had over a Visa transaction?

We had to buy full-price tickets (~ $1k) to get back home from a vacation due to a hurricane warning. We had no applicable insurance on original return tickets, but we got a full refund after a call to a bank's credit card department. Perhaps it wasn't 4 minutes as in your case, more like 15, but considering the circuimstances I think it's still pretty awesome :-)
no, it's an admonition to get better.

if you are not a great programmer, why not? if the reason is that you are just in it for the paycheck, it's time to take stock and figure out what it is you want to do instead. if it's because you haven't had the self-discipline to work at becoming better, that's a problem you should address.

everyone has the seeds of greatness within them. if you choose not to become great, it's your loss.
Sometimes I think I should do that for a living. But then I worry that that may take the fun out of it.
Hacker News Twitter Group
I've found great deals on half.com ... Like all three hardcover volumes of Knuth's TACP for $10 each ($150+ on Amazon). Also a great place for insanely cheap paperbacks (~$1 + shipping).
Also, AppleCare is there for a reason. And, they only offer it for 3 years for a reason.. that's how long these machines can reasonably be expected to last.
A Series of Stresses or A Series of Adventures | Ketchup Week
You may also want to google grim meathook future
7 Apps And Feature Updates I Want For Android
Also they're getting the dev unlocked version of the phone which is $400, not $180... a lot of subpar reporting on this, giz isn't alone in having the facts wrong.
I love it. There's always been bigotry - racism, religious wars, sexism - but now we have sitism.

The Redditors denigrate the Diggers, the HN people hate on the Redditors, though I think it's safe to say that the readers of Digg haven't heard of either ;)
Online research is narrowing the range of modern scholarship
At least the other things you do for a living are pretty fun.
I didn't know this was a 'I've been fucked over more than you' contest. You asked for the biggest conflict someone with a Visa has had.

It seems Amex is great as well I've just never had one of their cards.
This is linkbait crap (see cperciva's comment). Though I admit this would probably be big news if the annual February bonuses were eliminated.
I'm sorry.

"less than $100,000" = bootstrapped?
Unlocking the dynamic web
Instead of blaming readers--which this article does--it should blame publishers. They can sell me a $5 instant download and we'd both be better off.

Modernize or die.
snap.

I guess the same could be said of "Emo," but programming has more of a history of (blithely) excluding females. I'm happy to see I'm not the only one who did a double take.
Keep in mind that with most things the rate of improvement is much faster in the beginning and slows down as a greater level of mastery is acquired.

I've been doing this for about 4 years. I'd program at work, and then I'd come home and read books on programming, architecture, etc. When I didn't feel like that, I'd be learning a new language. When I didn't feel like doing that, I'd be writing some software to do this or that.

I want to continue to get better as much as ever, but now most of what I see, I've already seen. New things to learn come by less frequently than they did before. It's not that people in their 40's and 50's give up and just coast, it's that it's a case of diminishing returns.

Once you know a decent amount of languages, you see the commonalities and the point of it begins to fade, and how many books can you read on OOP or functional programming? Good coding style? Project management? When you're at the phase when every sentence in the book is a worthwhile lesson it's easy to learn fast. When lessons come through slow experience, like lessons from maintaining a project for 15 years, things go more slowly.
Websites, documentation, shell icon in dock/desktop etc...
I don't understand. You're saying that GM could build cars of similar quality to Toyota or Honda if they were only able to charge $2,000 more?

I defy any one of the big three to release a minivan comparable to the Toyota Sienna for anywhere near the same price (+$2k is fine).

And why does inexpensive have to mean low quality? From what little I know, the Japanese manufacturing mindset (read: The Toyota Way) is that high quality equals lower cost over the long haul.
Most negotiation goes on behind closed doors, so you wouldn't see it (and I doubt Matt would be at liberty to discuss specific instances).

The YC founders I've met in person have been plenty assertive, and when it comes to business, some are pretty downright ruthless. They are nice guys outside of business (which is probably why you don't see them as ruthless or assertive), but they have just as much killer instinct as any other entrepreneur I've met, and more than some. PG seems to select for that - perhaps that's why I was rejected 4 times. ;-)

When I saw the title, my first thought was "Umm, wow. People really think that?"
This is business. It's not about the visitors, it's about the $$$. If you don't make enough money to continue operations, you fail. Period.

They haven't reached that point yet, but they may soon.

Your argument seems suspiciously like being happy that you sell a lot of product, when in fact you lose some money on each product sold.
you're far better off knowing a little bit about code, and a lot about money, business or journalism, than vice-versa.

Has anybody else actually read a biography of Bill Gates? [1] Bill Gates was a hacker before he knew anything about money or business. Wikipedia:

After his [high school] administrators became aware of his programming abilities, Gates wrote the school's computer program to schedule students in classes. He modified the code so that he was placed in classes with mostly female students. He later stated that "it was hard to tear myself away from a machine at which I could so unambiguously demonstrate success." At age 17, Gates formed a venture with Allen, called Traf-O-Data, to make traffic counters based on the Intel 8008 processor...

...Gates and Allen did not have an Altair and had not written code for it... MITS president Ed Roberts agreed to meet them for a demo, and over the course of a few weeks they developed an Altair emulator that ran on a minicomputer, and then the BASIC interpreter. The demonstration, held at MITS's offices in Albuquerque, was a success...

...During Microsoft's early years, all employees had broad responsibility for the company's business. Gates oversaw the business details, but continued to write code as well. In the first five years, he personally reviewed every line of code the company shipped, and often rewrote parts of it as he saw fit.

Gates is not an isolated example. Who founded Apple Computer? Hackers. (Yes, Steve Jobs may be more famous as a manager than as a hacker, but in the early days he built stuff, too.) Google: Founded by computer scientists. Yahoo, ditto. eBay: founded by a programmer. Jeff Bezos of Amazon: comp sci degree.

You're better off knowing more journalism than programming? That's funny. Journalism is in flames, with senior reporters losing jobs by the score. One of the big reasons for this is that a lot of the money in newspaper publishing came from classified ads, and this money has been sucked away by a tiny company called Craigslist, founded by... a software engineer and comp sci major from my alma mater, Craig Newmark, a man with no background in journalism!

You are correct, though: Most people would agree that these folks are no longer best described as programmers. Society agrees that "programmer" is a word for assembly-line workers with no demonstrated creative powers, just as "hacker" is a word for 13-year-old script kiddies with criminal intent. Which is why many programmers are smart enough to come up with a new job title and/or a broader skill set after a few years on the job.

---

[1] Recommended: Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution. Somewhat dated, but the dated bits are some of the most fun.
There are definitely toy languages. lolcode is definitely a toy.

On a serious note, people dislike PHP because many of the language choices seem to have been made oddly to put it nicely. It's also domain specific. While I wouldn't want to play a 3D game written in Python or Ruby, they're programming languages that you can make whatever in. When someone tries to make a desktop app in PHP, it's just odd. PHP is a language in the way that JSP is. It's wonderfully useful for web stuff, but it's not a programming language made for everything - just web stuff.

And, to be honest, PHP does a lot of things that really aren't good practice if you're doing something other than creating a domain specific language. Like, you connect to a database with mysql_connect() and then run queries with mysql_query() and you don't have to pass in a link identifier unless you're querying a new DB. It completely isolates programmers from the reality of how variables like that get managed in memory. It's not a bad thing when you're just trying to get something done, but it also means that PHP people have no idea what a local static variable is and what that means (maybe it clings to you after you run the laundry?).

Likewise, a lot of programming is dealing with scope. PHP tends to muddle scope with globals in a way that can be convenient for web programs, but also means that you get a lot of people that don't know program design messing around in it.

Similarly, PHP isolates users from types more than most scripting languages. What's false? Who knows? It's actually a problem as 0 == 'apple' returns true. Yep. Integer zero is equal to any string. While I'm not a typist, I do think there are problems when you muddle too much casting to different types automatically.

In terms of Python/Perl/Ruby, well, some people are against scripting languages. They're slower than something like C or Java and want to be snotty about the relaxed programming they offer. Plus, well, you don't find C programmers that don't understand things like garbage collection or algorithm performance standards. Sometimes in the scripting world there are a bunch of cut/paste, keep trying something until it works programmers. They don't know what they're doing and stumble along not realizing why something works or doesn't. How many scripting programmers have thought about references vs. copies?

A lot of it is people being snotty about things, but a lot of programmers really don't understand programming. So, whatever. People call things names. It's going to happen whether they're geniuses or idiots.
'Girl' is the only gendered reference I see in his post, and it is used in describe who the forum is not intended for.
Thanks. I feel the same way. I wish I had been enlightened when I was younger.

Eventually, I plan to build a "k-12" system that incorporate entrepreneurial ideas. Of course, nothing big starts big, so I'm starting with minor curriculum changes.
Thanks for reminding me. I dig his blog too.
I don't buy this.

Specifically, the notion that random numbers from physical sources are important. The theory of pseudorandom generators is very well understood; and cryptographic PRNGs even come with the guarantee that there is no known way to tell the difference between its output and a truly random string. All you need, then, is 80 bits of true randomness as a seed for RC4.

Of course there have been instances when random number generators have been broken, such as Netscape's SSL once upon a time, but that was because it used a non-random seed (the timestamp), and not because of a weakness in the algorithm.

And this is all w.r.t. a malicious attacker. Simulations don't even come close to testing the limits of random number generators (in a provable way; Michael Mitzenmacher has a paper on this), and the Mersenne twister is in all likelihood sufficient. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mersenne_twister

It's really cool that they broke the true-randomness bandwidth record, but does every discovery in materials science these days have to be justified with potential applications to computing?
You may be interested in Haig Bosmajian's book/essay, The Language of Oppression
Again: totally not arguing with you. I'd be interested in knowing whether you've gotten the same customer support from your bank's Visa program.
"Three of my older laptops have had their hard drives fail (with painful data loss in one instance)."

More like they deserved what they got. A four or five year old hard drive should b expected to die yesterday and full backups should be an absolute requirement. I have had plenty of drives die long before that and would never dare push a hard drive to such a long limit with no backup, especially a laptop one that is moved around a lot.

And just to top it off "hard drives" are not Apple special hardware. I have noticed that some comments have negative points, how do I vote down something (in this case the article)?
Heart attacks often kill heart muscle which has permanent effects. Nicotine boosts dopamine levels in the brain within minutes, the negative effects take longer to manifest.
Heh, maybe I'm a bit biased, as at one point I used to work for a startup(not YC) that was only 3 guys in an apartment, but also spent thousands of dollars a month on hosting for a site that had only a hundred or visitors a day, because they were expecting that any day now, "they will come" and viral growth will make them huge.

Being YC-funded is a boost, but without marketing and efficiency, it's not enough. There have been numerous YC-funded startups that ran out of money.
Google's Discontinued Services
Only you and thinkcomp have actually provided the kind of (contradictory) subjective feedback I was initially looking for.
The Secret of Efficient Meetings
Can it simulate a browser as well as HtmlUnit?
The only computer that has ever failed me was a Sun Sparc station, 'round about 1995 ('twas the hard drive). Other than that, so far I've been unscathed. <knocks on wood>
Brain Reorganizes to Make Room for Math
I know a couple - just had lunch with one of them a couple days ago. One does contracting + part time teaching at a college. Another just cashed out of a startup with enough money to never work again (after having previously gone public with a startup with enough money to never work again, but kept it in the company's stock, which tanked along with the company).

Both of them have held managerial positions up to VP-Eng, yet decided it was not what they wanted to do and downgraded themselves to rank & file software engineers, albeit very good ones.
> I'm not a CSM, but I work with hundreds of them

Ooo, I'm in trouble now.

Seriously, I hope the smart among them regard the little vendor merit badge with the right amount of sarcasm, because if you uncritically swallow a bunch of ritual packaged as a methodology and think that that somehow makes you safe from project failure... you're doomed.

A Google query for "methane and carbon sequestration" nets 179K results; not proof positive, but at least as relevant as your wikiwhack.

Also atmospheric methane breaks down into carbon dioxide and water in the presence of oxygen (at sufficient concentrations the reaction can take the form of a flame, or an explosion) so increased methane converts into increased carbon dioxide eventually.

Now, if I had infinite amounts of time and patience I would attempt to set you right; but my life is too crowded to waste time on someone who seems to delight in inflammatory political statements on a tech/biz forum.

//sad day when I have to set up plonk for HN :-(
The website claims it was recorded in 2006 which I have a slightly hard time believing.
Already submitted by pg:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=409696
A well rounded programmer will ask questions and then bother to figure out answers to those questions. So I think a lot of the shortcomings of a "PHP programmer" should really be assigned to just a "cut and paste" programmer.

I can see your point about certain languages promoting bad practices though. It never occurred to me that people would not understand concepts outside of PHP because my progression was C++ -> Pascal (ha) -> Java -> PHP -> etc

If I had started with PHP I would be f'ed. PHP is great for many things I want to do but I have met "PHP programmers" who are quite lazy and not knowledgeable about programming in general.
"Winners are inadvertently picked," says Evans. "It drives out diversity."

That's an important point. I think students learning the art of research still have to learn how to look for prior literature that challenges the consensus of the day.
I'm saying that if Toyota had to pay $2k extra to manufacture every one of their cars, they would either cost $2k more (thus significantly reducing their market share and volume, and therefore reducing profits, increasing relative proportion of fixed expenses, etc.) or would be significantly inferior to what they are now due to having cheaper suspensions, doorknobs, etc.

You're talking 10-20% of the manufacturing cost of the car in an industry that has spent 100 years reducing costs in every conceivable way. There isn't that sort of slack laying around. The only way to recoup that cost is to use significantly inferior parts.

My next blog post will address that a bit. It's already written, just hasn't published yet.
Peeling Away the jQuery Wrapper and Finding an Array
Er, what's the point?
Since when was quoting a classic aphorism a source of "guilt"?

Since he's a moderately influential person participating in an interview where he knows his statements will be reprinted as his own words.

Is this common? If so, then perhaps I'm wrong for assigning blame to DHH. Can you point me to some other interviews where the interviewee uses a well-known quote that's not his without some form of attribution?

Usually when people quote Greenspun's 10th Rule they cite it as such.