skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Zed's essay is actually pretty good after applying the following transformation:

sed 's/libertarian/republican/'

Without that transformation, the essay is positively enraging.

I should note that republican here refers to the republican party who at times has espoused libertarian ideas. Don't throw the baby out with the bath water.
Intelligent Design Advocates Confused by Their Own Arguments
Why is that relevant?

You don't just blindly trust a supplier without testing anything do you.

Users don't care who wrote the code, it was an MS product, and MS should have ensured it worked, by testing it. They did not. Hell, just give it to an intern and get him to set the clock on it to key problem corner case dates.

If a supplier gives VW some faulty tyres to put on a car, and the car blows up, the buck still stops at VW, it's their responsibility to ensure their product works, including anything it relies on.
Currently, it seems the only way to download it is to use a torrent of bits. Such can be found in a bay of pirates. Search and you will find.
That's exactly the point. Apple are catering to the vast majority of people rather than the smaller minority of power users. Even among power users those people who regularly hotswap must be pretty slim.

I travel a fair amount for work and I have a second battery for my MBP which I almost never use. Airports mostly have somewhere to plug laptops in these days even if you aren't in the lounge.

As long as people can easily have a dying battery replaced (especially one which last 1000 cycles) at a service center I can't imagine that many ruffled feathers.

Worst case you can always get an external battery.
i've been using colemak for about a year and a half, and i'm very happy with it. the few times i'm forced to go without it, i can feel how much more my fingers are moving. emacs is quite usable with it, but vim requires some remapping (i'm an emacs guy so i haven't put too much effort it).
> fuck that Krugman/keynesian bullshit, read some Tyler Cowen

Well, there's a clear, cogent, and knowledgeable rebuttal of his points. Even for someone such as myself who is not a libertarian, Shaw's arguments are weak, and yet the best you could do is sling around a bunch of four letter words?

By the way, I do read Tyler Cowen, who is, by the way, much better at elucidating his point of view without resorting to profanity, and most likely has a lot more respect for smart people like Krugman and Keynes, even where he disagrees, and he is certainly not pinning blame on "The Fed":

http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2008/10...
Or read the epic novel "Musashi" by Eiji Yoshikawa, on which the movie is based. Or the "Vagabond" series of graphic novels. All first-rate entertainment, if you like samurai stories.
We're paying around $1100/month and looking to migrate off EngineYard as well - can you point me in the right direction and/or provide any tips for a migration to AWS?
For the people who have made the switch: Is there a real benefit to be had for people who are currently fast to very fast typists in QWERTY (say.. 80wpm+)?

Mostly I'm curious about typing performance more than RSI type issues.
As a customer I'm glad they are laying off people. They charge far more than they should for the resources you get, and it seemed like they had way too many employees than they needed. Our sales rep was totally clueless and gave us bad information several times - I wonder if he is still there..
I used Dvorak for a while but I wasn't really happy with it and went back to QUERTY because it was different enough that I found it annoying switching a lot. That was when I had to use a number of different desktop machines though.

Now I mostly use a primary laptop and I've been playing with Colemak which I've found surprisingly easy to get into. I would advice doing a typing tutor for a while though before you take the jump to use it for work related stuff. This means you can train your hands to a decent speed in "game" mode.
I run into this problem all the time. As hard as I try to be diplomatic whoever I am trying to give constructive criticism is insulted. It doesn't help that I'm usually trying to give criticism to my boss, but still (at the jobs I've held I have had very few colleagues other than my direct boss).
I am not trying to convince the person I am talking with to my side of the argument rather it's the audience. When people sit back and say your wrong because of X, Y and Z others see this as a demonstration of conflict so both sides could be right. But, when people say "the world is 6,000 years old" and you respond with "Did the talking snake tell you that?" it works on a different level.

Take global worming there is a manufactured debate on the issue and few people are willing to say, "Ok, smart guy how should we rewrite the laws of physics?" Or, letting people say "Clean Coal" like there is such a thing when they can say, "Ok, I agree that Clean Coal is great let's mandate zero CO2 emissions from coal in 5 years." so they need to say, "Well we don't have the ability to do that."
I'll second mattmaroon's comments and say that you're probably barking up the wrong tree. You should try to self-finance or go after love-money (family and friends) first. Once you have traction and revenue a commercial or short-form business plan might make more sense - until then it's all wishful thinking.

With that said I have found SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) analysis to be a useful tool...

Cheers
Only if by accident.
Criticizing vista is generally little other than an exercise of complaining, whining, etc.

Have you ever tried it? I have. I had to go back to XP because I had so much commercial software that would not run on Vista. Good luck finding a new laptop with XP in your local Office Depot.

Criticism is only truly useful when it can have a positive impact.

Agreed. To anyone reading this: Don't get Vista. It's garbage. There. I just gave positive impact. I potentially saved many strangers a lot of unnecessary pain.

If you want it different, go elsewhere.

Where have you been the last 20 years? If you have commercial or enterprise customers, there is no elsewhere.
I'd start by getting the budget and forecast together, and then write the executive review.
Get some feedback on it, and then pass it to the investors.

Go from there. You'll get an idea from the feedback and from what the investors say to know if you should proceed writing the entire plan, maybe they will find some holes in it, etc. etc.
Then if they still want the full plan in writing, go write it. You'll probably learn a ton just in the process of writing the executive review.
Austin Hill @ StartupEmpire in Toronto suggested that a reasonable VC-funded startup salary is based on needs rather than competitive salary. E.g. living expenses + a little, which means more $ for a CEO with a family & mortgage and less for a 22-year-old. He pointed out that you don't want to starve the CEO or force them to live in squalor because it's just not productive, e.g. the CEO needs to be able to rest well and stay healthy. Some VCs also tossed out $90k-$150k as reasonable salary once the company is able to self-fund that.
I've been using Dvorak for about three years (+ Caps Lock -> Backspace for about six months).

I find complaints about keystrokes in emacs to be overrated. I think the problem people have is that even though the keystroke for, say, "go to beginning of the line" may be "CTRL-a", in your brain it manifests as a separate keystroke and will require distinct time to re-learn, even after you've mastered a. Not a lot of time, but time.

I play Angband sometimes (in the laptop keyboard configuration), and for that I always go back to QWERTY, because I don't "press the letter p to pray", I "press the Pray key", and having that remapped and trying to relearn everything is just silly.

Personally, I'm not sure I recommend switching. But if you do switch, I do recommend keeping it. The anecdotal wrist pain mitigation evidence is anecdotal, but since nobody's done a study, it's all we have to go on.
Windows Mobile certainly does:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Mobile

but, yeah that's not really windows for most people.

Also, even if MS ported Windows to ARM (it shouldn't be that difficult), the problem would really be the applications, which would either need emulating (on an already slowish computer) or recompiling.
Microsoft vs other OS is similar Coca-Cola vs other soft drinks. Microsoft will "always" have a significant market share.
I've always been a "kitchen sink" programmer because that's the way I was taught to do it, and it's part of the fun of the job: anticipating everything which might go wrong and pre-empting it. Unfortunately, I noticed that I am a mere mortal anyway, so I could never anticipate everything.

Then about the same time I noticed that people would fall in love with very sucky products if those products did the core "thing" correctly. Crappy interfaces, poor layout, confusing buttons - didn't matter as long as people could work out how to do their task and get on to something else.

So, the next question I had to answer: why not just build something you consider sub-par in the hope that it will be useful to others, and perfect it later? Thinking like that lets me focus on what matters rather than wasting time working out which AJAX library to use or which colours would look best. Perfectionism really isn't a trait I admire any more.
I for one would be interested in a write-up/HN submission.
Me too.

I've written seven times for DDJ and I'm very sad to see it disappearing.
This is the first well-written, lucid piece of writing on zedshaw.com in a long time, and it's actually quite good. For those of you turned off by just the name Zed Shaw, put that aside for a second. I'm not sure I agree with what he's saying, but there is no cursing, complaining about mean people, or talking about how unfair the ruby/rails community has been.

Maybe he is going to keep that no-rant promise.
> OpenID died last year

Do you have evidence for that assertion? I use OpenID every day. If OpenID doesn't succeed, I'm sure something like it will.

> Americans like to think that Facebook is so dominant, but lots of people like Hi5 and cannot imagine using anything else, because their friends are all there.

That's a good point.
Your in an interesting, slightly unusual position here. That is, the investors have approached you, rather than vice versea. Business plans are normally written for a more general audience - I would find out more about these guys' other investments and see what makes them tick, and weight the business plan towards those interests. This may sound a little manipulative, but as some of the other posts have pointed out, a business plan is a fundamentally an investment-raising document, and in the medium term often has little relevance for the running of the company.
But of course you should take a salary, it would seem unprofessional not to.
To PG - an error(gulp) in the HN algorithm?
Hi PG, I didn't see a spot to put this, but I just noticed a very strange anomaly on this thread http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=424964

When I first read it, the entry from mixmax had been down-voted. That didn't make any sense to me as it is great advice, so I voted it up and left a comment on mixmax's comment.

When the page refreshed after submitting my comment, mixmax's comment had 6 votes.
Not sure if that is the way it is supposed to work (maybe x number of little voters like me cancels out x number of down-votes??)

It just seemed very strange that I would have such a huge effect!! ;)

Thanks for your commitment to this amazing community.
Pete
I switched to Dvorak until I was good at it, and then switched back to QWERTY. It was just too difficult to mentally switch to QWERTY when using keyboards not under my control.
It's easy to say "Hell, just give it to an intern and get him to set the clock on it to key problem corner case dates." in hindsight when you know there was a bug with dates. That's not really useful.

I'd be willing to bet Microsoft did all sorts of testing. The fact that there haven't been any other substantial bugs would indicate that.

"And I think the main lesson from this incident is not the usual refrain that Microsoft is lame. Rather it’s the even more commonplace observation that software is hard."

Pointing out how you could have caught a bug after you know what the bug is is not hard.
It's unfortunate that the desire for an efficient government has been tied into the desire for "small government" and libertarianism.

An efficient government is a laudable thing that everyone should want, and so cutting away the fat is a natural thing to do in any sort of political light.

I don't know why libertarians at large seem to claim ownership of this notion.
One can certainly make that argument, but it assumes people don't outgrow those sites, and they are just web sites by the way, not some new protocol or revolutionary thing. Social network has been around for ages, myspace and facebook are just recent reincarnations of the fad.

Perhaps the kids just haven't been around long enough to see that walled gardens are always fads and never last while true open systems like email, IRC, and the web as a whole cannot be displaced by any such private system.

Sure, kids like facebook, but then they grow up, get jobs, and discover the rest of the internet and actually start using it. The older folks aren't stuck on using old technology, they're wisely using the better technology rather than following teenage fads which won't last.
And quite a bit of evidence that suggests that the "myth" arguments are recycled propaganda from a guy in the early twentieth century who had an axe to grind. Since nobody's actually done significant, unquestionable science on the topic, it's hard to know.

The concept of somebody having an axe to grind about keyboard layouts strikes us as weird in the 21st century when switching keyboard layouts is one quick command in Linux, but back then there was money at stake. I take the whole argument both ways with a grain of salt and say that since there is no respectable science, personal experience is the only thing that you can use to decide.

(A lot of people come to understand that science is superior to anecdotes and personal experience, but when there is no science, anecdotes and personal experience are still better than nothing. If that bothers you, consider the contrapositive, and what it would mean for that to be false.)

I note that I modded you up, though, because the articles are still informative and useful to come to your own conclusion about what I've said in my comment.
I suppose a counter-argument to this is that the Fed has been coerced into doing this because the people who run it are best chums (or motivated in other ways) with the banks and lending houses that allowed this problem to spiral out of control.
i'd probably guess that there were just 6 or so other people who upvoted at the same time as you, not that you count for 7.
Your also talking about a book written in 1645 not just another language. The translation to "accept" on Wikipedia is far from the original concept so focusing on our connotations of our word is missing the point. I would say "Look at the world as it is not what you want it to be." but that's longer and less catchy.

"In all things have no preferences." > "React to what is happening not just what your ideas let you to see."
While most people's behavior would be net improved by following Carnegie's recipe, I don't think it's optimal. There are cases when you want to criticize something, even if it doesn't make you liked.
Y'know, I really feel bad for the folks at ActiveState. They put so much into Komodo. Really drank the Mozilla koolaid, I guess. And it's a great product, ... except for the speed. And they're a smart bunch. If there were a way to speed it up, you'd think they'd have found it.

I hate to say this, but you know what I'd really like to see happen? For them to cut their losses. Just take everything in Komodo that's not tied to the XUL (or whatever Mozilla pieces they're using), and redo their GUI in ... well, there's more discussion on that in this HN thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=423119
Copilot OneClick for Macintosh
The purpose of part of the business plan is to show that you've given thought. A business plan is basically a collection of things that are pretty smart to think about and write down, plus a whole bunch of other crap you pulled out of your ass to try to impress investors. Smart investors have their own ass from which to pull numbers.

I know lots of people who got funding with no business plan, in fact few tech companies have them at all anymore. Giving thought to what you're doing does not necessitate a business plan.

Rather than making you waste days or weeks of your time writing one, smart investors simply ask you all of the key questions. Who are your competitors and how can you differentiate was asked in every meeting I've ever been to. I couldn't have raised funding once, let alone the multiple times we have, without having given thought to that and being able to answer.
Things are a bit of a pain on Macs

Do what I do:

(Here's the default layout for reference (ignore the Dvorak stuff for the purposes of this comment). Note the placement of the thumb keys: http://www.ergocanada.com/products/keyboards/advantage_image...)

Remap both of the keys next to the control keys (Alt/Option on the left hand; Command/Win on the right hand) to the Mac Command key. There's a handy extra key cap provided with my Advantage Pro that lets you put the same Command/Win key cap on each of these keys, so it will even look right. (Alas, that trand won't last; see below.)

Now remap Home to Option. Remap Page Up to Option as well. Now you've got Control, Command, and Option under both thumbs. The only problem with this is that total strangers who are trying to use your keyboard will be unable to find your Option keys, but who cares about them? ;)

This takes away your Home and Page Up keys. I like having Page Up/Page Down available, so I remapped Ctrl-PageDown to PageUp. So I can hit PageDown to page down, and C-PageDown to page up.

I don't use the Home or End functions at all. I remap End to Escape, the Escape key to Caps Lock, and the Caps Lock key to F9. Then I set up F9 in Emacs to trigger my own personal keymap and, lo, I have an entire keyboard full of new two-keystroke shortcuts that I can program. (e.g. CapsLock g g instantiates Magit; CapsLock s opens a new shell in another emacs window, CapsLock m opens a manpage, CapsLock j is dabbrev-expand, etc, etc, ad infinitum)

Kinesis keyboards are fun!
Human-electric hybrid car
Monetization should make or break every company that ever existed. It's silly that there are companies that can't monetize but are considered "successful".
A part of the reason may be that lots of people make their living off this "fat."
Yes, my fees are included in the savings. After the setup fee I'm charging $300/month on top of the AWS fees to keep things running. If the client needs things like performance optimization, that would be billed hourly.
Yes. It just happened to get a lot of votes at once.
I actually think this sort of functionality should be present throughout all forms of online communication. If that happened, the same standards of discourse might leak into offline communication as well.
Aptera Pushes Back Vehicle Production to October 2009
While it doesn't cover all the topics you mentioned, http://www.linuxcommand.org/ is definitely worth a look as it has more of a task-based approach. The SuperMan pages are great; they organize all the man pages for common packages into categories based on functionality (eg, text processing, multimedia, networking, etc).
I've played with one of these as well, and I've noticed that while typing raw text is considerably easier, I'm frustrated by the limited support for modifier keys. The control, alt, and Windows keys are put under the thumbs, which I found awkward to type. Also, they are distributed among four keys, so you can't have them all on both the left and right. You thus can't follow the recommended typing practice of pressing a modifier key with the opposite hand as the key being modified.

The function keys are also unusually small and difficult to locate by touch (and, given the above, some function key/modifier combinations are quite challenging). The Windows context menu key is gone entirely, which means you have to use shift-F10 instead, if you need it.
Usenet was open, why did forums take over? Why do people prefer MSN and co to IRC? Sometimes the technology you think is right does not win. Keep your mind open.
Since this reaction is so strong, wouldn't the logical move be to exploit it? I think successful salesmen often figure out how to reinforce people's ego defense mechanisms. They play to their audience's fears and offer some sort of relief.
Check out http://www.datahand.com
The 'many ways to the top of the mountain' precept covers the existence of other valid precepts.
Well people don't talk about the TV news all that much, because TV news has a similar content model as blogs. Read the newspapers, translate the highlights to your audience.
Agreed.

I initially tried to use the browser scroll to get back to the full page, then realized there was no horizonatal scroll.

An x similar to light box in the top left of the sliding panel could fix it a bit.
Come on now. Date bugs are very common. In the area of date bugs, leap year, rollover case bugs etc are very common.

It's extremely simple to just check the startup procedure, and make sure that nothing can go terribly wrong. Look for possible infinite loops, stack overflows, erroneous jumps etc standard testing stuff.

I discovered a date rollover bug in windows 98, which got some press at the time (Day after it released, I was working at a y2k company). This one wasn't quite as bad, just turned out that if you startup your windows 98 PC at a little before midnight (On any day), it messes up the date and thinks its the wrong day.

I'm sure there are other companies that don't test things properly, but excusing it isn't helpful.

Heck why didn't microsoft just write the code themselves instead of relying on someone else for that? It's pretty simple code.

Keep excusing them if you like, but it's just sloppy. I'd be amazed if something like that happened to the iPod, because Apple are anal about having complete control of everything, and it shows.
That's one reason why I'm not so keen on learning Dvorak - you won't be able to write efficiently on any other computer than yours. Until now, it was just my assumption, that by learning Dvorak (or any other layout as a matter of fact), you'll lose your QWERTY-fu. Thanks for sharing.

I'll probably stick with QWERTY and a Kinesis keyboard.
Wow! That's really interesting, maybe we don't realize just how many people are actually voting on entries and comments.

Thanks for the speedy response.
COMPLETELY wrong. Telling someone the good as well as the bad is an obvious sandwich - everyone knows this, and the good is completely ignored.

Saying something is good is praise. Saying the bad is critism. Combining them makes some type of praise-criticism hybrid, it does not make good criticism. Let me give you an example of what you are saying:

Hey Dude, I really love the colors on your website. It sucks that your website is really useless to the entire world, but that butterfly you put up there is lovely.

How is that good criticism?
John Nesheim sells an Excel spreadsheet ($25) for creating financial projections. My background doesn't include accounting so it was a big help, factoring in many things I wouldn't have thought to put in our plan. I used it successfully to raise my first round of funding.

http://www.nesheimgroup.com/quickup_model

(The financial projections are just one component of your business plan, of course.)