skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
spending trillions, whether its for cleaner energy, or buying iPhone fart apps, _is_ an economy. Nothing is "lost".
I've just been impressed with what the Times has been doing with the web recently. They seem to get it. So many newspapers are going the way of the Auk, it's nice to see the Times start to offer some compelling offerings to developers.

Newspapers have an immense amount of long tail content, but most of them don't have a clue that their old content is valuable. I'm excited to see that the Times is starting offer API's to let developers play with some of that long tail content.

The movie reviews API is really just a start. They also have a tags API, and they say that they're working on a search API on this page: http://developer.nytimes.com/docs/timestags_api
Software development is always changing, yet we spend great effort managing change. Just because the climate has always been changing does not mean we should not try to understand and manage it better.
Poor people in the USA (at least by the official definition of poverty) do not lack good housing or leisure time. In fact, the poor have more leisure time than the rich.

http://www.heritage.org/Research/welfare/bg2064.cfm

I won't comment on their feelings ("a sense of security"), or their ability to socialize with Angelina Jolie.

In any case, by "lifestyle" I simply meant "material standard of living". I.e., $25,000, $50,000, or $100,000 worth of consumer goods and services as measured in 2008 dollars.
Silly question. Jeans and t-shirt. On a more interesting note, some old-timer (I think Jerry Weinberg) said that the reason hi-tech dress codes are so lax is that in the early days of computing, programmers were so scarce that they could get away with pretty much whatever they wanted. With the notable exception of IBM ("go home and don't come back until you're properly attired"), many companies were unable to enforce what they considered correct behavior. I for one am very grateful to our deviant forebears.
You haven't had a Thinkpad :-) (ducks).
Good stuff. Brings to mind classic Hubel & Wiesel work on receptive field structure of single neurons in the visual system:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cw5PKV9Rj3o&feature=relat...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MDJSnJ2cIFc

http://hubel.med.harvard.edu/b18.htm

[edit: Wiesel, not Weisel]
Well and concisely put. This is the actually the one fact we should try to get into these people's heads. The only change is in the _distribution_ of wealth.

What we should be worried about is not wealth but welfare. And I'm not sure polluting the environment and using up non-renewable resources improves anybody's welfare. Not even that of the people profiting from it.
If I think back on every significant business deal or job I've landed in my career, it's happened as a direct or indirect result of me putting myself out there and meeting new people.

More often than not great things are not going to just fall into your lap while you're sitting at home. You've got to get out there and interact with real live people to make things happen, scary as it may seem sometimes.

Great article.
Sorry dude. I've had a few Thinkpads that have failed on me (wireless died completely on one, screen on another). No manufacturer is immune to things dying after awhile.
If its within 6 months, AppleCare should have replaced it for free. There were some known battery issues - Thats why Apple replaced (and still does) the batteries if you bring it in and your battery is bad.
The first computer I ever owned had the motherboard die after a few days, maybe I have bad luck.

Almost every hard drive I have had has failed.

I just had a new 500 gig I used for backups fail after less than a year. It replaced a 160 gig that died after 2 years.

Every laptop I have owned has had the hard drive die (3, one mac).

I have had cd and dvd drives fail in various machines.

Personally the least hassles resulting from failure has been with Macs because I buy the applecare warrantee, and I just bring the machine in to get it fixed in a few hours. I imagine Dells service would be comparable, I would probably do that if I had a PC as my primary machine.
I've had an Amex Gold Business Card since starting up in 2001. Their customer service is the best and their web site keeps getting better each year for tracking my transactions, etc.

I've also had them go to bat for me a few times over disputed charges and I've always been very happy with the outcome. I'd highly recommend them.
Getting to the spirit of things: How do you learn? A developer shares his learning process
Okay, to further explain, I have a standard transmission, I drove very slow, I took back roads, only a couple of miles, and I was following a coworker, who had a very large truck that I could run into without causing harm harm. (I never hit him).

And yes, it was in my younger, and probably stupider years. Though I am stupid enough I would likely do the same thing again.
The absolute best way for techies of any stripe to network, IMHO, is through user groups and meetups. Start going to a local programming language users' meeting, Maker/Dorkbot events, etc. -- and participate.

Ask questions, share code, give an unrehearsed five-minute lightning talk, whatever. Just make sure that people have a chance to notice you, and see you doing something interesting. If you make a habit of doing this, you will start developing a professional network, and opportunities will get sent your way.
I'm not, I'm saying your argument is wrong. You play every hand your dealt. If you fold pre-flop, you played your hand by folding it. So I assumed you meant more "voluntarily play after the flop".

However, if you still win every hand you take to the flop, even if you voluntarily only play aces, you would in a tournament probably be forced all-in many times, in which case you'd involuntarily see the flop. But we still say you win every hand you play, so you'd never go broke.

But in reality none of this has anything to do with the OP's stupid quote. A guy who won every hand he played, any reasonable way you want to define that, would be by far the most profitable poker player ever.
I'll start by saying how cool it is that I think you're doing this for your class. I wish someone had turned me on to the possibilities that entrepreneurship brings when I was in high school.

Hard to go wrong with some Seth Godin. Here's a link to Seth's best from the past two years.

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2008/09/best-of-the-...

I also like this series from Mark Cuban called "Success and Motivation"

http://blogmaverick.com/2007/12/24/success-and-motivation/
I'm going to keep buying Dells because even though I bought the computer in the US, when the HD crashed here in Austria, they had a guy at my house with a new drive in just over 24 hours. Yeah, I paid a bit more for the service options, but since this computer is my business, that makes sense, and ended up saving me a lot of worry. The overall price was still very reasonable for what I got.
As always, this kind analogy doesn't apply to digital copies. For the analogy to work each digital copy would need to be recoded from scratch by the original developer.
Every Mac I've owned has not failed. Seriously, they are all still chugging along.
I once had a minicomputer fail on me when one of the TTL chips fell out of the CPU.
I'll clarify a bit too. You get dealt two cards. When it's your turn, you play them. Maybe you fold, maybe you raise, whichever way you make a decision and play.

If you win every hand you play, you can't fold. If you fold then you played a hand and didn't win.

How's that?
Although I mostly agree with Joel, there's no pride in going down with a sinking ship (if applicable).

If you're in the american auto industry or newspaper industry get out as soon as you can. Or start a business that capitalizes on their failures; it's how Toyota has thrived.
just to keep consistent with "Happy Hanukkah" "Happy Halloween" and "Happy New Years."
Oh man, I know from experience that nothing good will come from this.

Let the torrent of anecdotes begin.
It's not playing at all.
Looks awful with Chrome also.
Kontrol - a micro framework
Kontrol is a small web framework written in Ruby, which runs directly on Rack.
Please don't flame.

The statement "people who run Windows are generally not trend-setters or early adopters" remains true, and is actually supported by what you said. Also, the poster did not refer to Windows users as "suckers" or "incompetent", or describe Windows as "inherently insecure", so you should consider the possibility that you've misunderstood the intent of the message before accusing him of "hubris", "bigotry", and being a consumer of "propaganda".
Lot of startup successes happened on the backs of copyright infringement. The goal is to just get traction and then deal with it. It works somewhat often, and it's actually fairly rare a startup is unable to license some sort of deal and survive.

But no, I probably wouldn't do it personally. There's a tradeoff there, in that on one hand you're increasing your odds of success (potentially) by building on the backs of services that you know people want. On the other hand, there's some chance that if you're successful there will be a lawsuit.
The blog is a good part of their advertising strategy.
My best friend's two (and only) Thinkpads both experienced hardware issues.
I think that was what "anewaccountname" was quibbling about. It's pretty difficult to not get enough salt unless you're fasting or in a hot climate.
A VM is great for trying out an app, but if I'm really going to use something, it becomes a PITA to have it in it's own sandbox. I don't want to deal with network sharing and all that just to move files between all my apps.
Broken window fallacy. Redistributing capital to renewable energy sources means that more money is needed for the same amount of energy (at least right now) which means that money which could have been used for other purposes like food, water, the US infrastructure, houses, or medical bills now must go into satisfying this absurd need to conform to some arbitrary green standard. Its called opportunity cost, go read up on it. TANSTAAFL.
Folding a hand is not playing it? I would define any action (fold, call, bet, raise) as a play. You would almost certainly define folding on the river as a play, why not folding preflop?
It occurred to me also that many ante games have a forced bring in, and some only that. You'd be profitable in both of those games if you won only the hands you were forced to play. If there were 8 people, for instance, even with an ante and a bring in, you'd bring it in 1/8 times and win 7 antes plus whatever else was put in the pot.

If everyone else folded every time you were the forced bring-in, you'd be break even. You'd have some streaks dependent on your opening cards (sometimes you'd bring in more than your share, sometimes less) but long-run it'd be even. Otherwise you'd win.
So many organizations, so many acronyms, so much talk, but nothing is getting done. This:

The results were dramatic. Deutsche Bank shifted $32 billion of troubled assets, turning a $970 million quarterly pretax loss into $120 million profit. And the securities markets were fooled, bidding Deutsche Bank's shares up nearly 19 percent on Oct. 30, the day it made the startling announcement that it had turned an unexpected profit.

is exactly what these organizations were supposed to stop. Instead they _knowingly_ allowed it.
I wonder how well this would work in Phoenix?

For us the problem isn't getting enough heat, its keeping the heat out. And our air conditioning bills in the summer are astronomical.
Gdium: One Laptop per Hacker (OLPH)
It's only broken windows if there is no net benefit. Bringing externalities into consideration by the market is the function of government to a first approximation.

And, ahem, "some arbitrary green standard" cite please?
I certainly haven't done a study, no. I'd love to see one too.

I believe there has been some evidence that supports the ~40 hour work week. I suppose 40 exactly is a tad arbitrary, optimal number is probably some strange decimal, but I'd be surprised if it wasn't really close to 40 for the average person.

Perhaps it depends on the individual, perhaps for some its 40 and for some its 50, etc. Maybe the latter group succeeds more. I feel like this is untrue, but certainly can't prove it.
There are some horrid logos in there, and some very well done ones as well. My favorite: http://media.nokrev.com/junk/haskell-logos/logo9.png
see erik.naggum.no
I think for many students, history would be much more interesting if taught backwards, starting with a current event and working your way through history answering the "whys".
Google NY office tour (video)
Sounds like the Bill Gates school of IT. The YC startup community has a different set of social mores which emphasize usefulness of the product, a certain trendiness with respect to what else is happening in the current web 2.0 world. We are not really the budding monopolist types. Yes, there is a certain timidness in the YC community about the dark art of business. But that's mainly because most of us have never worked :)
It is sad that Joel chooses to tarnish a valid point about programming as a career with such crass sexism.
Accounting standards could, theoretically and technically, be as transparent and open as OSS. As far as the IASB and FASB's manufactured reporting standards to the public go, they might not even need to exist: transparent accounting could really solve most of these issues. Deception can only occur when some aspect of the formula is mired or obscured. I truly think transparency in accounting is going to be the wave of the future.

My Bachelor's is in Accounting, and one of the reasons I chose to not go into financial (or tax) accounting was this very reason: the legalities. It's just too easy to find a loophole and to adjust financial statements to be appealing to whatever audience an accountant wishes, inside stock owners or outside stakeholders. What portrait I am forced to paint is directly correlated to whomever is paying me. Yeah, technically it might be "legal" but it's not always an accurate or truthful portrait of a company's financial position. Ethics are a giant issue in accounting.

There's a reason the big five accounting firms were reduced to the big 4: SOX always gets a bad rap, but its intentions were really decent. It's just that the degree of complexity has risen beyond an efficient means to capture that complexity.

Openness and transparency, then, are actually the best and most efficient ways.
> You play every hand your dealt. If you fold pre-flop, you played your hand by folding it.

Mmmkay. This is the confusion.

It's pretty common to talk about "playing" as opposed to folding your cards pre flop. I've seen this phrasing many times.

> A guy who won every hand he played, any reasonable way you want to define that, would be by far the most profitable poker player ever.

The point I was trying to make, and probably the OP, is that it is more profitable to win $100 and lose $80 than it is to win $10 and lose $0.
Parrot 1.0 (http://www.parrot.org/news/vision-for-1_0)
nobody tell the watchdog groups that nitrogen is in the air, they'll try to ban it.
Did other people do this? Or was the upmodding to say "I should have done this"?
From his website, http://www.naggum.no/

"I am unable to keep my company in operation for health reasons, but it is one of those things I just cannot give up. Instead of being a commercial undertaking, it is now only a hobby. Until my health improves, which it might never do sufficiently, I am generally unable to accept programming projects, teaching opportunities, or requests to advise students, although I would really like to see what I can do if you would like my input."

If you're looking for more of his, ahem, observations try his page on wikiquote : http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Erik_Naggum
Thomas Edison?
Well, I've worked in the business world. But I have no interest in "assertively competitive business practices". Most of the managers I worked for who were comfortable with that type of approach were exactly the reason I wanted to escape into the startup world and never look back at corporate life again. So, if you want to call that 'timid', go ahead. I'd rather do my own thing, make a good product and try avoid "doing evil" as much as I can. This probably sounds cliched or like I'm trying to win some brownie points but it's actually how I think. It's not worth it for me to live in that kind of "assertively competitive" way that I see my father and his colleagues living - or working, I should say. That feels like the old way of doing things.
http://www.paulgraham.com/good.html
Wow. That was really excessive. I can't imagine why Joel felt the question merited that kind of response.

My feelings mirror one of the other comments in the thread: most software jobs suck. Not everyone can work at Google or Fog Creek, and outside of the protected bubbles of the major tech centers, software work tends to be a tedious grind. (Even in the protected bubbles, I know a lot of dissatisfied techies -- free soda remains charming for only so long when you're working insane hours in a cube, on death-march projects, taking all of your creative orders from the MBA with the corner office.)

The sad thing is, I think that Joel and the guy posing the question are both partly correct: the software industry does pay really well for new grads, and yet it does discriminate against older techies. Programming is a questionable long-term career choice. Instead of insulting the guy for asking a question, why not have a discussion about the problems he perceives? Software may be better than ditch digging, but that doesn't mean that programmers should be eternally complacent and unquestioning minions of code.
FREE Coloring Pages - Camp Rock - Jonas Brothers - Demi Lovato
Is he seriously saying that nobody needs to use large matrices in these days of internet data? Google uses online implementations of some algorithms because they can't hold the whole matrices in memory at the same time. Maybe Google is not the average hobbyist, but hell yeah there are some large data sets out there for free, exhibit A the World Wide Web.
In related news, suit is back this year...

Amazon's PR here is not particularly insidious, what you see/read in Mass Media is PR roughly 80 percent of the time (some MM such as The Economist excepted).
Agreed. That one is solid.
Why are we tolerating this kind of witch-hunting? This is very little different from arresting people because they know how to read or wear glasses. They ought to be arresting the kids who don't have chemical labs in their garages for criminal lack of curiosity.
Can we think for ourselves for once? I don't know if you've noticed but a lot more companies succeed from not listening to pg's advice than vice versa.
Only if your goal is to win the lottery. What's left after the last iFart has puttered out?
Times are tough now for everyone, software engineers are not immune.

In engineering there isn't any discipline that can guarantee a steady cool job for the next 40 years. An engineer needs to adopt all the time, that's part of the game.
What's the current legal status of bundling the JRE with your application? I seem to recall that fairly recently (three or four years ago) you had to download it from Sun and "sign" a clickwrap agreement in order to get it working.
Or the "screw your best friend over by stealing an idea he's been working on, implement it behind his back and launch it before he even has a chance to register the domain name he told you about over lunch". Google it.
The problem is that "if you build it they will come" DOESN'T WORK in a field where thousands of startups are competing for the same set of eyeballs. Unless you market aggressively, and cut costs enough to survive longer than your competitors, you will fail, guaranteed.
I've been recently studying more ancient Chinese history and the game of Weiqi (Go, as it is known in the US). Weiqi is a good way to understand the sociopolitical strategies of China. In Weiqi, it is often easier to surround and assimilate (embrace and extend) than it is to invade and conquer. If there is a grand strategy of the current political heads of China, it is to make China the pivot point of the world. America goes forth and spread democracy; I think the Chinese prefers to get other countries to orbits around them, the way the earth orbits inside the sun's gravity well.

An observation of the inventiveness of the (Han) Chinese I think is best written by Neal Stephenson in his essay published in Wired Magazine in 1994: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/2.02/mao.bell.html

"This article is the result of a two-week trip to Hong Kong, Shenzhen, and Shanghai during September '93, during which I tried to get some sense of how the Chinese perceived the influence of technology - particularly digital technology - on their culture.

The answer is that this issue hasn't occurred to the Chinese yet, and probably never will, because it basically stems from a Western, post-Enlightenment perspective. Going to China and asking people about the Hacker Ethic is like going to Peoria and talking to the folks down at Ned's Feed & Grain about Taoism. The hacking part comes to them easily enough - China is, in a sense, a nation of analog hackers quickly entering the digital realm. But I didn't see any urge to draw profound, cosmic conclusions from the act of messing around with technology. "
google no worked.

perhaps you were hallucinating this event
You're talking about the Dark Side. Don Corleone. Donald Trump. Dick Cheney. Bill Gates. Cloak and dagger stuff. Yeah, I'm not very good at that either.
Bargain Hunting for Books, and Feeling Sheepish About It
Is shy=introvert=geek? Not necessarily IMO .. arent these 3 different concepts?
There are 2, maybe 3 good ideas on that page. I think that

http://haskell.org/sitewiki/images/0/07/Lenny1.png

and

http://media.nokrev.com/junk/haskell-logos/logo7.png

are the best.
"An engineer needs to adopt all the time, that's part of the game."

An engineer who adopts all the time will soon need a better job to pay the bills.
Strong agree. Sharp, professional.
This really doesn't make any sense at all.
Your googlebait is not effective, can you at least share the domain name with us?
Well, what happened to me was that I was having a tough month, and a couple of automated ETF's came in unexpectedly. They all got returned NSF on the same day and the next day without any warning they just shut down my account without notice. The only way I knew something was wrong was that I could no longer log in to my account.
Seems to me that's a CSS framework without the useful parts.
Looks like just a reset with "sensible" styles that look terrible in my browser and don't seem like anything I'd use myself. Why not make use of the "C" in CSS and separate "reset.css" and "sensible.css", or at least declare the styles twice to distinguish between removing styles vs. adding styles? I don't get mixing the two.

Oh, and putting Arial before Helvetica is just shameful. Not just because Arial is shameful, but because every system that has Helvetica (i.e. Macs, some Windows users) also has Arial. So as written, Helvetica will never be seen. Likewise for Courier New vs. Courier, or Times New Roman vs. Times. It's nice to declare fonts that look best on each platform, but only if it actually works.
About whether edw519 is "doing something wrong" because he's had bad partners? Oh well. Another missed opportunity for me.