skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Okay, then, Zed's argument fits the pattern of something formulated by someone outside of their area of expertise.

Zed has exhibited difficulty with the precise use of terminology before. In the recent talk that was posted, you hear him saying for people not to come up and correct him on his use of terms like "Turing Complete."

http://blog.cusec.net/2009/01/05/zed-shaw-the-acl-is-dead-cu...

There are other terms that he unintentionally abuses in the talk. (left as exercise) Still, I think it's a great talk and agree with a lot of what he says. He reminds me of a coworker of mine. This coworker is hazy on things like the laws of Thermodynamics and some aspects of Object Oriented Programming, but he seems to get things done, and I'd have to say he's a good programmer.
They are great if you only use a few systems. However if you are working on other people's systems or some other case where you are not the sole user of the machine, it is difficult to deal with switching between QWERTY and Dvorak; which is the main reason I do not use Dvorak. A friend uses Dvorak exclusively and it works well for him - he only touches his own systems.
I would argue they don't rely on it so much as make use of it. As cities grow then they need to truck supplies in from elsewhere, but for suburbs and rural areas they can survive on the local economy.
Yes, usually I find Zed to be better able to back what he is saying. I don't know what happened this time.
As stated above, Libertarians are against big government and big corporations. The argument has been made that big government couldn't exist without big government.
Not really, I probably don't read as much because I find myself devouring so much online content, but just last night I sat down and spent 3-4 or so hours devouring a new book I'd been waiting to be delivered (and have 3 more like it waiting to be read).
An interesting post comparing piano playing and typing

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=35481&cid=3832754
Interesting. I always thought it had to do with the SubGenius.
It's worth remembering that Dale Carnegie was a salesperson. Salespeople can afford not to criticize. That's because, when the sales negotiation ends, they will present you with a contract to sign -- a contract that has been written by some of the bluntest, most critical, most paranoid people on Earth: Lawyers. Salespeople get away without criticizing because they outsource the task to lawyers.

As an engineer, it pays to have great sales skills, but you have a much harder task than the average salesperson, because ultimately your job is more like the lawyer's. Your raison d'etre is to build things that actually work. In the famous words of Richard Feynman:

For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.

And that forces engineers to be critical. The decisions they make in the early parts of a project could make an order-of-magnitude difference in the eventual cost. If they don't find the holes in the plan ("gosh, won't your proposed friends-of-friends search scale as O(N^3) and ultimately bring your social network to its knees?") or properly evaluate the likelihood of rare-but-deadly scenarios ("is it worth a million dollars to guard against the odds that our offsite backup's drive controller will fail just as an earthquake takes out our primary data center, or shall we just buy insurance?") the whole enterprise could fail catastrophically.

Perhaps many engineers err on the side of too little Dale Carnegie. But it's telling that many of the great ones don't so much avoid criticism as get really, really good at selling criticism to you. Think of Steve Jobs, one of the most critical people in human history, who gets away with it by playing the role of a fanatically driven artist. Or Torvalds, who is really blunt but turns it into a joke: He makes fun of his own bluntness (he named his DVCS "git" -- look it up in the dictionary!), he's deliberately over the top, and he plays strictly to an audience of engineers, who are more likely to see the humor in lines like "CVS users are ugly and stupid" than the average person is.

Try to moderate your criticism, but don't forget that ultimately it is your job. Don't lose focus on it.
Nigeria, Libya.

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20071031-classmate-pc-o...

P.S. Thanks for making a reasonable request for information rather than cursing!
Especially program transformations, compilation, correctness proofs, model checking... Other ML-style languages might be good too, but Haskell feels cleaner and more modern, and seems to have a more vibrant community these days.
Is it wrong that I use the arrow keys in Vim?
> IMO saying X is correct when you are wrong should lead to ridicule lest others assume it's a reasonable argument.

I think ridicule is a bad idea, because it invariably activates one's ego defense mechanisms. When that happens, your chances of convincing someone that they're wrong (assuming that they're wrong) drop to zero, while the level of polarization goes up. Granted, some people are so hardened in their beliefs that only widespread ridicule may be able to put a crack in their shell (albeit at high psychological cost).
Its sad because Amazon itself is a significant premium to rolling your own host for most situations. (It's undoubtedly worth it often, but in terms of hardware cost, it's pricey.) So EY is a significant premium to a significant premium.
Personal criticism is harsh and a bit rude.

However criticism of code or architecture should be encouraged and seen as a constructive thing as it lets you discuss different approaches and why the current approach was taken and how it can be changed or improved.

Criticism and debate in Math, Engineering and Science should be encouraged.

Related: http://micromath.wordpress.com/2008/12/26/women-and-mathemat...
GM? Ford? I know IBM, HP, etc. get government contracts or at least did and those count as government support. Don't forget Microsoft which was supposed to be broken up but wasn't. Also, Bell and Rogers (in Canada) who are basically allowed to have monopolies over the phone and cable lines.

Lockheed Martin and Boeing couldn't be as huge as they are without defense contracts either.
We shipped http://letsfreckle.com without a lot of "features" that most people would consider necessary, banking on two things:

a) we wouldn't get a lot of initial signups, and we just wanted the positive feeling of shipping (and keeping our commitment to ship), and

b) just because a feature is considered required by common wisdom doesn't mean jack.

So, for weeks, you couldn't deactivate or delete a user account, or a project, or a number of other basics that we bypassed in favor of perfecting the "main dish": entering time.

We got a lot of unexpected traffic, so we were wrong on A. But even with 800 new accounts the first week, only one person wrote us noticing the "missing" features. By the time people caught on, we'd prepared those features for deployment.

Same goes for handling accounts where the CC couldn't be charged at the end of the 30-day trial. We had 30 days to deal with it.

It takes a lot of discipline to draw that line in the sand, and it's worked out very well for us.
You do get used to the layout in Vim eventually, but I agree it isn't intuitive. I've been tempted to remap HJKL to HTNS (the right hand home keys in Dvorak) in Vim, but haven't done so yet.

The main reason that I haven't tried out Colemak or other more unusual keyboard layouts is that they aren't installed by default on all OSs yet (unlike Dvorak), which makes it more of a hassle to switch layouts when using other people's machines.
I haven't tried an alternative layout, but I do use a Kinesis countoured keyboard and that has made typing less painful for me. My hands rest very naturally on the keyboard and there's less distance to travel when tapping the keys.
http://www.kinesis-ergo.com/advantage_pro.htm
iTunes+ also doubles the bitrate on that music.
So, were do I download it?
something like http://www.angel.net/~nic/passwd.html (placed on your own server, behind ssl, of course)
Criticism is great, but it should be done appropriately. Instead of telling someone how much X sucks, tell them that, in your opinion, X they might be able to make X much better by doing A, B, and C. This is difficult to do appropriately, but very helpful to everyone.

It is also difficult and important to learn to listen to criticism. However, you can probably screw up your life much quicker by giving criticism in an undiplomatic way than by failing to take criticism.
Sooooooo...just a bunch of precepts to turn you into a nihilistic Bushido robot who can make for an efficient killing machine?
> How do you deal with coworkers doing/saying stupid things, especially in programming and science?

I think the real question you have to answer for yourself is, who died and appointed you the arbiter of stupid? Why do you think you should go around and share your opinion on what other people want to do and say?

The fundamental problem is not how you present criticism, as other commentors have suggested. That is a techie "hacks" approach to the issue.

It's your attitude towards other people on the whole. You want to critize because of the way it makes you feel, not because you want to help them grow as human beings.

I don't know you personally, but a lot of people with the kinds of criticizing problems you describe look at being correct as being righteous, and being incorrect as sinful, unvirtuous and contemptible.

Just biting your tongue's not going to solve this underlying view.

What you need to cultivate is respect and empathy for everyone's humanity and their complete otherness from you.(And some gentleness for yourself, too.) I'd recommend some vipashyana mediation.

Note: I'm aware of the irony. But you asked.
I switched just over a year ago - it didn't take me too long to get up to an acceptable speed (45wpm), but it's taken quite a lot longer to get up much higher than that. I'm currently between 60 and 70 wpm, and I still find I need to think about the typing to get up to that type of speed.

The 'mistake streaks' do get better as you go along though - I find that I just switch between thinking about what I'm typing and the keyboard layout when I make a mistake, which helps avoid repeated mistakes. The context switch is annoying though, ideally I'd like to do around 90wpm with 100% accuracy, which is why I've started practicing with a typing program again.
I've also read that book and had a similarly spotty recollection until last week. The Yellowstone supervolcano is irrelevant to my life and I can't do anything to prevent it. If it erupts in my lifetime, then I'll care a lot, but I can't predict that so it's not worth worrying about it. I was reminded of it last week when I saw my little sister for the holidays: she's a geologist and was wearing a t-shirt that referenced it. Family asked and she went on at length about it, more than Bryson does in that excerpt. It's relevant to her life in a way it isn't (and hopefully never will be) to mine.

Don't feel bad about not remembering unimportant things.
I really think it comes down to "The last sucker" to invest in facebook loses, I think facebook can't sell to anyone but microsoft because of their investment... and perhaps microsoft is waiting for the big crunch; then will get them at a really good price.
I just took a 10 week entrepreneur course called FastTrac, there are many local versions of the course throughout the US. I took a version in NYC. The course met once a week for 3 hours and was a great networking and social gathering. It was taught by a Professor at Fordham University who has his own startup company and used to be a VC.

The goal of the course was to teach you how to run a business and complete a working business plan after 10 weeks. Each class had a guest speaker and round table discussions. They focused on a different topic every week: market research, sales, accounting, legal needs, financial projections. I highly recommend the course if you want a crash course in how to write a business plan.
His article made me angry enough to write a rebuttal post. It can be found at http://justlikejesse.com/2009/01/08/re-the-two-flaws-of-libe... for all two of you that may be interested
S.F. Yelp user faces lawsuit over review
I think that depends on if you need the salary for the timeframe in your plan. The investors want to make sure you'll be around to see the startup succeed so unless you're independently wealthy (or at least have enough to cover yourself for a few years) I'd include it.
Best Mouseover / Hover Text yet.
There is quite a bit of evidence that Dvorak superiority is a myth:

http://www.reason.com/news/show/29944.html
http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/221/was-the-qwerty-...
Couldn't agree more - the problem-fixing approach is fantastic for focus and motivation. My new startup follows this pattern, we're pre-commercial and the funders have got us to do market research in tandem with prototype development. I was a bit wary at first, wanting to jump into the problem fixing part with the engineer, but the more research I undertake, the more I realise that other people have also had the same problem, and tried to fix it; at least by knowing about these attempts we can save ourselves a lot of dead-ends in the problem fixing process.
unfortunately it's not as easy as saying it might be able to be done by by doing it way X. my sister was constantly offended by my intended to be constructive criticism of her cooking, and usually it was a simple as this would be better if you used more salt. I never said it was bad, I merely suggested how things could be improved, and she took this as an insult, and a complaint.

I find that people don't like criticism period, doesn't matter what, you are criticizing or why. They see it as A, complaining, B insulting, C plain negativity.
I think a lot of it has to do with your interests. For example, you're a HN reader and you come away with "Yellowstone == supervolcano." A new mom would probably read the quoted text and think "Yellowstone is dangerous, don't take the family there." A kid who is into fireworks and explosions might remember "TNT the size of Rhode Island, cool!"

When I read, I usually just remember the big picture plus the small details that I personally find fascinating.
I still love magasines- no iTablet to read on the toilet yet...

Wired
Billboard
Urb
The Beat
Vibe
Fader

when I'm in the US or UK I also usually grab a few things at the bookstore:

Wallpaper
Mix UK
Future Music
> "doing/saying stupid things"

if you think something is stupid slow down. stop. try and understand the other person's perspective and the root of their concerns.

be respectful. i find this easier when i'm in a good mood and my mind is actually being respectful, rather than simply watching what i say. the latter is important, too, because emotions, stress and frustrations cannot always be avoided or ignored.

1. their perspective and concerns are likely valid, even if they don't have the background to properly express their concerns or come up with a smart solution.

2. no one is stupid, we just have different backgrounds and are in different places of development. sometimes it is appropriate (and useful) to teach or mentor others; other times the group needs to stick to a process that permits communication and specialized expertise.
Maybe. It depends where you live, though--not every area is capable of sustaining its own food supply(1). And, even those that are still import some goods.

But I think we're shifting the discussion a bit to a "Long Emergency" scenario.

As a bit of localist, I'm more troubled by local governments who bend over backward to bring large retailers into an area. I think these more localized benefits (tax breaks, development dollars, etc) are far more beneficial to, say, Wal-Mart, than the highway system.

(1) And many that can have transformed that land into housing and strip malls.

EDIT: Fixed formatting.
Why would the German government care about what happens to hedge funds who get screwed by speculating with stupid unhedged short bets in the secondary market? That has no relationship to actual investing in German companies.
Good point about gov't encouraging home ownership. It is extremely frustrating to hear all the rhetoric about the failure of capitalism and free markets when the markets are anything but free due to government subsidies designed to encourage home ownership.
A related question, how much is a reasonable salary for a startup founder? Do investors usually assume the founders will be living in squalor, eating noodles and paying themselves nothing until profitability, or are investors usually open to founders that have existing financial commitments - family, mortgage etc.

Probably varies massively, but I've often assumed that investment often requires you don't take a salary, or very much at all anyway.
I'd say it could be described as "malicious" to redirect a site's traffic to another site, especially an adult one. It's not "good, clean fun", that's for sure. It has consequences for people.
You really don't see what's happening then? You know how people get to a certain age and then they stop wanting to change the technology they use? That's what the adults in your office are doing. Email is like having a fixed-line phone - it's going slowly out of use.

The young ones are the ones that change technology, not the ones who have already adopted a technology. It's difficult to shake off the inertia of an existing method, but when you see someone young compare two technologies (email vs social-networking mail), and in almost all cases choose one option, then that option has won.

People who have to choose for the first time are overwhelmingly choosing one side. So it does not matter what the grown ups in your office are using because those grown ups are being replaced.

Email is not going anywhere soon, it has its place, but for sending messages to friends, social networking has already won.
I've been using Dvorak non-stop for the past three years, and I absolutely love it. I don't type any faster than I used to either, but I've lost most of the wrist pains that I had when using Qwerty, and I enjoy the fact that everything is in a much more logical position.

I find that most keys are in "better" positions for general development, even in vim (I always use the arrow keys, not hjkl). Having the colon key right next to shit is extremely convenient, as the ability to one-hand `:qa` when I'm done. The dash/underscore key is infinitely easier to reach on Dvorak, which is immensely helpful when dealing with C and PHP code that tends to use underscores for variable and function namings. My only complaint is that the [ ] brackets are further away, but the gains I have from the rest of the layout more than make up for that inconvenience.

I also took the time to remap the physical keys on my laptop, and purchased a couple inexpensive mini keyboards (no numpad) that have laptop-style keys and were reportedly very easy to switch layouts, and I use one at home and took the other to my job. Having physically-mapped keys went a long way towards helping me out, and at least helps out anyone else who sits down at my machines.
How do you implement a failed login delay?

I assume you'd have to just sleep before sending the response. But this could tie up all available threads for processing requests and bring down the site under heavy attack.
Hi, I was on the Bryson train....

there are a good many techniques to enhance memory, most usually deal with some form of visual imagery. I'm pretty sure this hinges on the idea that a very large proportion of the brain is given over to visual processing, so one would assume that capturing a visual image of an idea would better help one to recall that idea many years in the future. And the image of the gaping maw of a spewing super-volcano, is pretty hard hitting. That's probably why it eclipsed the details and left you with the "bigger picture" as you so unconsciously put it ;)

for instance, do you remember what Coprolites are?
probably not, and probably for a good reason, they are Fosillised Dino turds.... not a worthwhile image for association, methinks

;)

but they are also esoteric, so I wouldn't get caught up about not remembering what you consciously don't attend to. Association is a powerful tool, and you would probably surprise yourself if you could see everything you _can_ recall about things that hold your attention well.
OpenID is not that complex that the technology is important. And seriously, OpenID has already gone the linux way - if a technology is pushed so heavily and utterly fails to make a mark, then LET IT DIE.

OpenID was not intended as a method for sites to perform communicating between themselves, and even if you can use it for that, why not create a protocol that faces the reality of auth methods right now.
I think he did that so that things like code, which are messed up by wrap-around, can be presented cleanly.
I can't wait until we see our first rockstar Madoff. :)
I'm in agreement (note that I could not really tell what you were saying in your original comment).

If I need to do some tightly coupled thing with threads and shared data etc. I'm not going to be looking at Python anyhow.
Good business plans are tough. I was taught at Northwestern by a very successful entrepreneur how to build the presentation, business plan, and financial model.

You need to cover the basics. Here's what my last one covered:

- Executive Summary

- Project Information

- Company Description

- Market and Industry Analysis

- Marketing and Sales

- Operations

- Management

- Capitalization and Structure

- Development and Milestones

- Financial Projections and Models

- Summary and Conclusion

It's no easy matter. This was a 30 page plan. I'd love to talk about the breakdown via IM or skype; it's just too much information to put into one comment.
Because to make money, people need to pay, and when people need to pay, growth slows. Their focus is on growth for the moment, and for that they need to spend.

It's like playing monopoly - at the beginning of the game you concentrate on buying as many properties as you can, because you know later they will bring you profits. If you immediately start building when you have just 3 cards, then you will earn money right at the start, but you will suffer later.

Facebook can sell itself at any time it wants to. Money is not the issue.
we moved to london to be in the center of the advertising community, which is working out well. been there about 4 months now (i can confirm that it's always raining here).
The investors don't get repaid, they earn when the company earns.
My girlfriend at that same resolution last year, I think it lasted a good 48 hours before she started talking in other people's back.
You have to understand that Musashi is a swordsman. Understand these precepts in that context first, then generalize.

For example, the precept against preferences makes perfect sense for a swordsman. If you prefer a particular attack, then this becomes a weakness. You will tend to see openings for that kind of attack instead of seeing a better opening for a different attack. You also become more predictable.

In the west, a non-swordsman would instead say, "If all you have is a hammer, then everything starts looking like a nail."

Applying the above to computer programming: Sometimes people will implement something in their favorite language despite another being vastly superior for the particular purpose.

The correct analysis and generalization of the other precepts are left as an exercise.