skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If people became rich and the price-elasticity of demand dropped way off, then a business model based on squeezing every last bit of inefficiency from the supply chain and passing the savings onto consumers to gain market share would be in jeopardy.

Sustained high gas prices? That'll push more people into its target demographic. It will increase shipping costs, but that's a problem for all Wal-Mart competitors, too.

I don't know if Amazon has any plans to target the down-market niche. I am guessing that some things like clothing, food, and housewares most people will never buy online. Also, I don't know that it will ever be as efficient to ship to individual homes as it is to ship to large retail locations. So, I don't think Amazon will ever win out on price.
In one test Charles was shown a pair of digits and asked to name the larger number. The bigger the gap, the faster most people can do this: they say “nine” faster when shown 9 and 2 than when shown 9 and 7. But with Charles, the reverse was the case—and the researchers could see why. Rather than telling the answer directly, he was counting on from one number (on his fingers) until he got to the other, which meant he must have started at the smaller, or he got to ten, in which case he must have started at the bigger. Most strikingly, he lacked the fundamental numerical ability possessed by most newborns: being able to tell the number of objects in a small group simply by looking. When asked how many dots were on a sheet of paper, he counted on his fingers—even when there were only two.

Charles’s deficit, though severe, seemed to affect his numerical abilities alone. Numerical deficits in people of otherwise normal abilities can be even more striking in cases of brain damage. Lisa Cipolotti, a neuropsychologist, studied a Signora Gaddi, who used to run a hotel and keep its accounts. After a stroke she could find the number of things in a small group only by counting—when asked how many arms a crucifix had, she got Dr Cipolotti to hold out her arms so she could count them. Signora Gaddi’s problems seemed to affect only numbers. She could still read, speak and reason, remember historical and geographical facts, and order objects by their physical size.

In fact, Signora Gaddi’s difficulties went even deeper than Charles’s. The stroke which damaged her innate understanding of small numbers also robbed her of the entire numerical edifice built on that foundation. For her, numbers stopped at four. When asked to count up from one, she got to four and no further. If there were more than four dots on a page she could not count them. She could not say how old she was or how many days were in a week, or even tell the time.

Scary.
Reminds me of Nucor. It is twisted and surprising that companies that think about their employees' happiness first are not the norm, what we do have is megacorps with CEOs that make billions and let everyone else suffer, especially customers.

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_18/b3982075....
Don't you edit text when you are new to a language?
Errr... my comment above was meant for an entirely different thread!?!

The time when I could edit it has passed, mod me to invisibility.
The title of the post is ok, maybe some ranting is useful. But it starts off and continues with narrow assumptions.

First, the Zed quote at the top:
"In contrast there are masters in the martial arts who learned their art as a means of survival and became masters in a realistic and hostile environment. We don’t have anyone like this in the programming profession, or at least I haven’t met any."

I guess Zed needs to meet more people ;). I started my IT career as a student working at IBM in 1987. I worked for a department chock full of masters that "learned their art as a means of survival and became masters in a realistic and hostile environment".
After 5 years working there, I went on to work for some of the people that pioneered OOP. They were also masters and taught me alot.

The post goes on to declare:
"I think that’s probably a prescient assessment of things in the hacker profession right now, and it takes a certain amount of audacity to make such a declaration. Zed Shaw is one of those people who seems to really have his finger on the pulse of things in the tech world"

I think this view only applies when you take into account the surge in growth of web developers since the dot com boom. Even then, masters were born, they just get drowned out by a sea of average developers that never learned software engineering rigor.

Maybe ranting can be useful. But other aspects of the post only hold true if you are only looking at certain categories of developers.
I seriously doubt that the situation in the Tenderloin can be blamed squarely on rent control. There's only a small part that's genuinely scary, and that seems almost institutionally embedded at this point. Rent control or not, you're going to have a hard time convincing the affluent to move in next to the SRO's, liquor stores, porn shops, homeless centers, and methodone clinics. I think geography is to blame more than anything - it was completely destroyed in the 1906 earthquake, it's not downtown, not on a hill, and not near the bay (where the wealthy wanted to be), but it was close enough to all these things that the lower class that worked for and entertained the wealthy could set up. Throw in the flight to suburbia that hit most cities after WW2, and it's pretty understandable why that part of town is like it is.
No; what follows is that they must have been (not be) successful behaviour (not the most successful behaviour) for human beings to have. Evolution selects for things that work, not for things that are best, not least because possible adaptations that never actually turn up don't get the chance to be selected for.

It's almost certainly true that the heuristics built into our brains work better in practice than you'd think from a here's-how-we're-irrational description. But they still cost us sometimes, and it's good to be aware of them and look out for them in cases where we need the best answers we can get rather than the best we can get in ten seconds.
I think the point is not so much about whether one should take a chance or not, but more about how much risk you're willing to take when creating software.
Er, no. John Gruber posts a lot of links, but what he doesn't generally do is to copy-and-paste someone else's stuff and try to make it look like he wrote it.
Their employment page also lists jobs titles that they are hiring for:

CNC Machinist /
Senior Product Design /
Outside Sales Engineer

Clearly they have titles. Perhaps the vagueness of the article is actually indicative of it not being very accurate or telling the whole story.
Okay, fine, but the op that he's replying to suffered the same flaw by pointing to cases of politically connected wealthy people in rent-controlled apartments. Where's the proof that rent-control inflicts large systemic damage across all groups? It's certainly not in the topic's article (see my other post).
"Lottery tickets" and "boring little applications that people happily pay money for" both have a chance for success, too, if that's your thing.
> The quiet successes by small teams who stand little if anything to gain by sharing their numbers and telling about their success. Lest they attract competitors or other unwanted interest.

This is the money quote from the linked David Hansson article. I personally know of five small companies that have minted multi-millionaires that have ZERO web presence for their products. I suspect discrete pursuit of an industry niche is actually the dominant path to riches, but you'd never know it if you only relied on the media and google.
i heard that tesco was planning to put carbon footprint on all their product labels. has this been implemented? do they generally have an environmentally friendly or social good philosophy about them, or is this new?

(my first thought when i hear of a huge super market that encourages consumption and driving is not "that'll be good for the environment", but perhaps their products reduce packaging and so on, which would make the success of their own brand especially awesome)
"Buildings aren't maintained because the owner sees the opportunity for dramatically increased profits if the current tenant leaves and lets the building fall to shit in an effort to drive them out."

You say this as if it's not a side effect of rent control itself.

Helping people avoid being priced out of their neighborhoods is desirable, but rent control has so many side effects that it's not worth it in my opinion. It's basically taxing people when they move to or within a city to pay the rent for people who have stayed in the same place. There are probably better ways to achieve that goal.
Graphs: A Better Database Abstraction
Anyone who considers themselves a professional designer or user experience expert has done this. Google Website Optimizer makes it easy for anyone to do, and there are more advanced systems like Omniture's offerings that provide more options and more data on the results.

This is how a lot of "best practices" are determined. I know I've found out changing button colors or icons can increase conversion rates on email newsletters and changing a sign up process can vastly decrease the number of people who bailout at some point. Testing designs is very important.

I am guessing if 37signals conversion rate dropped significantly, they'd redesign the page again - it's kind of like a rudimentary way of split testing :)
> Also, I don't know that it will ever be as efficient to ship to individual homes as it is to ship to large retail locations. So, I don't think Amazon will ever win out on price.

Maybe not, but that seems like the wrong comparison. The question is if it will ever be as efficient to ship to individual homes as it is to ship to large retail locations, plus have people get to those locations to pick up the goods.
Dumbest Studies of 2008
4 Simple Steps to Finding an SEO Friendly Domain Name
Not to pick on this author in particular, but I wish I had an easy way to filter out everything said about startups by people who haven't personally done it successfully.
Offers Free Online Support Community
Through our free community of people helping people, we foster an exchange of knowledge and promote further understanding and serve as a platform for individuals' stories of success and challenge.
Universal prosperity, I would say no. Just having large sums of money doesn't stop people from being greedy (i.e. wanting to spend absolutely as little as they possibly can).
"I Have a Startup" - Midwest vs Bay Area
Of course it's a side effect of rent control, but it's not a necessary side-effect of rent control. Rent control laws do allow for increases to cover maintenance, so the money is there. It's not like doing away with rent-control would have a better outcome from the POV of the tenant - instead of living in a gradually deteriorating building, they'd just have been kicked out.

BTW, I'm not a necessarily a fan of rent control, I just like its goal. I really don't know enough about the issue to make an informed policy decision either way. My main point originally was just that this article was terrible - stupidly reasoned and completely lacking in meaningful evidence that would let me make an informed policy decision.
Speaking of dev tools, are there any high level URL libraries similar to Python's urllib2? This [CFHTTP stuff](https://developer.apple.com/iphone/library/documentation/Net...) looks low level nasty!
They should have done A/B testing with all these different designs, no?
Poll: Startup grammar question
I've encountered a variety of grammatical formulations recently, and I'm wondering which people here prefer. Which of the following would you say?
"I have a startup."
"I am doing a startup."
"I am a startup."
Other (list below).
I think people are concerned because of this part: "This December 2008 earthquake sequence is the most intense in this area for some years."

Of course, I think it's all much ado about nothing; but people are kind of tuned in to looking for disasters like this. It's human nature.
The Year in Tech
"I is a startup."
Interesting. It would be fun to have numbers for the past, too, to see how much 'bouncing around' there was, and what it could be correlated with.
Much more discussion here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=414226

and here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=414583
At a 7.5% annual increase from 1971, they would have originally been paying just over $5/month (that's about $25.34 in today's dollars). I'm not an expert in NYC rent prices in the early 70's, but that seems absurdly low. Maybe it's that cheap for some other reason?
I started a startup.
"Rent stabilization in NYC isn't mandatory for new construction,"

In NYC, future crazy regulations are always a worry. Most new construction IS rent controlled. My previous apartment (built to be condos, but the owner was unable to sell) was. To evade various ridiculous NYC taxes (which make a lot of new construction unviable), you need to submit to rent control.

"if landlords can't charge rents commensurately, where are the sky high rents coming from?"

Sky high rents come from current demand. Rent control provides a disincentive to long term investments like new construction or major renovations to rental buildings.

Incidentally, neither of the "things that bother you about the free market religion" are actually part of the free market ideology. 1) only applies to efficient markets (like the rental market, with many buyers and sellers, and good information) and 2) is closer to the Clinton/Bush/Dodd/Obama ideology that ownership is something to encourage.

"Neighborhoods don't just magically become expensive to live in. I won't claim that the only reason is because good, noble people moved in when things were cheap and turned things around, but it's ridiculous to suggest that the people living in a place have nothing to do with that place becoming a desirable place for wealthier people to live."

In some cases the people are completely unrelated. The main attraction to living in Harlem is the 1-6 trains. Having tried to get a sublet for my old place, I discovered that the people living there make it less desirable to live in.

"You're making an emotional appeal for a guy with a family to have a right to be close to his job - that cuts both ways, you know."

As far as who "deserves" to live on some place, it's a wash. So lets not favor any particular group over the other. As far as emotional appeals go, I'm not casting any group of people as assholes.
Cars without catalytic converters are cheaper than cars with them...
Agreed.

Though a blog post isn't as bad as writing a book about it [Guy Kawasaki] :).
The article includes the interesting comment that a fairly eminent geometrician had little number sense of the kind described in the article. One of the wonderful things about mathematics is that it combines reasoning about discrete, countable things, that is numbers, with reasoning about shapes, that is geometry. An especially good book about both aspects of mathematics is John Stillwell's Numbers and Geometry.

http://www.amazon.com/Numbers-Geometry-John-Stillwell/dp/038...

I'll quote a bit of Stillwell's preface to give the flavor of the book:

"What should every aspiring mathematician know? The answer for most of the 20th century has been: calculus. . . . Mathematics today is . . . much more than calculus; and the calculus now taught is, sadly, much less than it used to be. Little by little, calculus has been deprived of the algebra, geometry, and logic it needs to sustain it, until many institutions have had to put it on high-tech life-support systems. A subject struggling to survive is hardly a good introduction to the vigor of real mathematics.

". . . . In the current situation, we need to revive not only calculus, but also algebra, geometry, and the whole idea that mathematics is a rigorous, cumulative discipline in which each mathematician stands on the shoulders of giants.

"The best way to teach real mathematics, I believe, is to start deeper down, with the elementary ideas of number and space. Everyone concedes that these are fundamental, but they have been scandalously neglected, perhaps in the naive belief that anyone learning calculus has outgrown them. In fact, arithmetic, algebra, and geometry can never be outgrown, and the most rewarding path to higher mathematics sustains their development alongside the 'advanced' branches such as calculus. Also, by maintaining ties between these disciplines, it is possible to present a more unified view of mathematics, yet at the same time to include more spice and variety."

A more controversial, and plenty spicy, comment on the algebraic approach to mathematics as contrasted with the geometric approach to mathematics is Paul Halmos's article, "Applied Mathematics Is Bad Mathematics,"

http://books.google.com/books?id=rQ6FAAAAIAAJ&q=Halmos+A...

(that's not a full-text view of the article)

which I disagree with, as maybe Halmos intended his provocative title to be disagreed with.
I'm working at a startup
I am starting a small business.
Physicalising ebooks
Meta-comment: Could we please fix the quoted-text-not-wrapping 'problem' on this site? I hate having to scroll x,000 pixels to read a comment just because someone is using <pre> or whatever it is.

FF3 on OS X.
Now that is some creative office space
Samsung I320N/i321 Unlocked BLACKJACK 
The i320 is pretty straight forward, running on Microsoft's Windows Mobile 5.0 with 120MB of onboard memory (with a microSD slot just in case you need to add more storage). It's uses tri-band GSM, supports Bluetooth and is capable of GPRS/EDGE where available.
It's intentional; people just abuse it (myself included).

Indented text is intended to display code, which should not be wrapped by the browser's width.

It's up to the poster to format their text accordingly.
Python Decorators: What they are underneath
VIDEO: THE ASCENT OF MONEY
Yep, I just read the formatting help and fixed it. Different defaults on different forums lead to users being surprised. Sorry about that.
I can has startup?
Sometimes the choir needs to be preached to, though. It helps to hear someone else put into words what one might be thinking intuitively. It also helps to know that more people are thinking the same thing than any individual might give credit for.

The flip-side of this is that people like Robert are not just preaching a dreamland ideal that people should aspire toward but accept up front they'll never be able to reach. The expectation is that people take what is being preached and put it into practice; but that's not what I usually see. I normally see people who will arm-chair philosophize about, but will either succumb to peer pressure or fear before actually pushing for what they believe is a good thing. At that point, the believe is completely useless.

The upshot of this is that places that actively prevent people from turning out anything but crap need to be actively prevented from turning out anything, if we expect conditions to change at all. But it's a risky position to take, and most people seem under the impression that the thing it puts most at risk is the livelihood of their families. While I think that risk assessment is melodramatic, I will admit it does put one's social class at risk, which ties directly into the relative creature comforts of their family. Knowing why people prioritize this latter matter so high is something I've been struggling with for a little while, but maybe it's just because I lack the context of a family to support.
I'm from rural Vermont and more recently Boston. I'm moving to the Bay Area next week. I'm really curious to see how pronounced this effect is.
New York Times profiles on Twitter
"because someone is using <pre> or whatever it is."

I had indentation to show starts of paragraphs, which I have since removed for your reading convenience.

The help link in the bottom right of any edit window here on HN explains what the formatting defaults are. I just learned something today.
Ex-KGB General Says Covert Action, Not More Troops, the Key in Afghanistan
Well, it's depressing because I would like to get good at what I'm trying to do, or at least think it's possible.

But I take your point, and I am enjoying myself regardless. :)
What do you think about the timing right now for putting together apps for other mobile platforms, like Android? I am thinking of getting into it, since iPhone seems crowded.
Automated ad-hominem ftw. Of course only people who have [define success here] can say smart things about startups and business :)
It’s a Renter’s Market in Manhattan Office Space
That 'article' reads like a summary of 2008 of news.yc.
People seem to be accustomed to that, though. And they enjoy being able to look through various options for a particular good in person. And the store makes out when people buy things that they weren't planning on buying. And most folks tend to batch trips (my family would take a trip to Wal-Mart about twice a month and buy a lot).
I'm curious what job titles people give themselves.
Hey, there's an inspirational story there. Thanks!

I think your personal experience holds true in a lot of domains: start with something small you can wrap your head around, and then expand outward from there.
I run a startup
I'm avoiding cubedom.
"Brains. Must eat brains."
The 2008 Malware Challenge
http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/html/pa580/pa580index.html

page 13

Keep in mind that these are "soft libertarians", people that consider themselves economically conservative and socially liberal, but don't necessarily go around trolling message boards with anarchist philosophy.

2004 seemed to be unusually bad for the republican percentage of the libertarian vote. The only worse year was 1992, when Ross Perot, Clinton, and Bush I all got a third (well, I think 2008 will be bad, too).
Good news: Consumers Union buying the Consumerist from Gawker
Two things that are never mentioned that show how a language like Visual Basic 6 or VB.NET (which I believe are still taught in high school or college programming courses) is just backwards for learning computer science. First, at least in Visual Basic 6, functions didn't return values like in any other language I know of; instead, the function name was set to a value, like a variable. This alone would not kick you out of the function. You had to remember to type Exit Function, unless you were at the end of the function definition already.

Secondly, visual basic 6 (and .NET) evaluate the entire expression, even when it is obvious it cannot be true, which causes all sorts of issues to popup if the developer is used to C and similar languages that support short circuit operations, as described at the end of this article. For example, you could not rewrite the c statement if (n != null && n % 2 == 0) in visual basic 6 without using two nested if statements. The overall product benefitted from Microsoft's backing and ability to easily use any of Microsoft's controls, which allowed for fast development. But the language features themselves were atrocious. VB.NET introduced two keywords, AndAlso and OrElse, that do support short-circuit binary operators, which I only learned about from googling just now. The language is a pile of dung and nobody should be introduced to it any more.
Ask HN: Where are you spending your New Years Eve?
A party with friends? Going to Times Square or your local alternative. In your living room with your family? At home by yourself reading HN?
The people I know at McKinsey like working there a lot. They are also driven by different things that those working at a startup, so their idea of a "good place to work" is likely to be rather different as well
My respect for Mike Butcher has gone up considerably with this post.