skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's pretty fascinating. My own ideological path went from

- Republican conservatism (raised in a Republican household) to

- pseudo-communism (some crazy idea I had in high school without reading Marx) to

- Objectivism (a friend gave me The Fountainhead while in college, picked up Atlas Shrugged shortly after, then Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal and Peikoff's book on Objectivism) to

- utilitarian liberal (introduced to Mill in a course on political philosophy (along with Nozick, who is unconvincing), studied more utilitarianism in other courses)

Note that I'm a utilitarian first, and liberal by implication of (my) utilitarian logic. I'm also aware of the bevy of criticisms that have been leveled at utilitarianism, some of which are persuasive (the Greatest Happiness Principle does not adequately address the complexity of moral psychology), while others are simply demanding a precision of calculation that's not attainable. In practice, one can successfully apply utilitarian reasoning in a great many situations.

The problem that I have with libertarianism is that I don't buy the "negative rights only" stance (at all), and believe that social interventions backed by force of law are necessary to overcome historically and sociologically entrenched inequalities of opportunity (positive feedback loops of discrimination and decay). That we haven't done it as effectively or efficiently as we would like doesn't mean that it shouldn't be attempted at all. There's room for experimentation, and we're getting better at experimenting. Many of the recently developed entrepreneurial practices (fail early) can be fruitfully applied in this area.
Mountain. Molehill. Make the connection.
I'm embarrassed that I got past the first two paragraphs.
> We should welcome this fantastic circumstance and make use of it instead of trying to arbitrarily make it look like physical property.

Well... yes and no. I absolutely love free software, and if I were really wealthy, would work on nothing else. However, the idea behind creating property where none really exists is this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good#Introducing_an_excl...

With the possibility being that, without any of the mechanisms mentioned, "intellectual property" kinds of things might be underprovisioned. I.e., why sink 5 years of research into a new widget design if you can't even recoup those research costs because someone else just copies your design.

That's the theory, anyway. In practice, it's a big, hairy, complex discussion that revolves around various compromises, and in terms of policy, in places like the US, it probably leans too far in favor of IP producers, or at least those with deep pockets.
It's one thing to make sweeping statements about welfare of others and quite another to realistically look at what that means. I am nitpicking here but let's go over your list... I am going to break it down to how it really is in NYC (I presume LA is not that dissimilar):

burger king workers - unhappiest people you'll see anywhere... excepting teens and other temporary situations, completely unemployable outside the fast food industry

street vendors - mostly cash income, probably make more than reported $15/hour, probably have other jobs to support them through the cold winter months

bus workers - unionized, make up to $70k/year

broadway ushers - mostly volunteers or actors who only work until they "make it" and only to network with other theater people

busboys - mostly illegal mexicans with little other choice, excepting some high end restaurants where they make more than $15/hour and do it as an apprenticeship to better paying jobs

I think most people who say that $15/hour in a major city like New York or LA is pretty good would not themselves concede to subsist on that little while working that hard... and I know what I am talking about, having done some of those hard-labor jobs when I first immigrated into the US. It only works in temporary situations such as students or apprenticeships, or as a means to support higher artistic aspirations.

I would bet all of my money that not a single person on here (including those 6 who upvoted your comment) would choose a career of a $15/hour laborer for themselves, and I think it's a little patronizing to say that it's ok for others.
Why you can't trust your gut in this market
I agree with the article for the most part. People like to think they're special because of their ideas, but ideas are easy to come by. It's partly why I hated doing projects for friends as an undergrad. They'd think, I have this amazing idea that's going to become huge on the internet and really just need a trained monkey to translate idea into a functioning web property. The problem is that they'd have an idea like, "create a website where bands could upload music and users could listen for free and bands would get a cut of the ad revenue!" and then everything beyond that was my problem. Even something as simple as a name couldn't be chosen because they couldn't implement even simple things. Better yet were the people who had just "stolen" an already implemented idea (say, eBay) describe it and then at the end casually say, "kinda like eBay" as if that wasn't something I knew existed. Then when I ask, well, how should the reputation system be implemented (positive only, wait a week after each has entered their feedback to display, require some feedback or the user themselves gets neg feedback as a non-feedback provider, auto-extend auctions so that there's at least a minute after the final bid before it closes to prevent sniping. . .) they'd be clueless. Those were my problems. They had an idea!

However, sometimes people do what I would consider stealing of ideas. For example, you and a friend start creating mockups and going through the interactions and then he decides to take that and go his own way. Then again, I guess the author would probably classify that as design and implementation rather than idea.

Truly, what is patentable should be very small. Discoveries, ideas and business models are not the implementation of an invention. Likewise, it must be an implementation. For example (since the History channel always seems to have stuff about this), if you come up with a way that a gun pushes the next bullet into the chamber and pulls back the hammer, fine. If you say, I want to patent a gun that automatically gets the gun ready for the next bullet, not fine. In the first, you've done a specific thing - there might be more than one way to do it and you've developed a specific fashion. In the second, you're just saying that it could be done through some method you haven't implemented anything.
I think it's incredible that given the entire resources of the American state they can't give the president secure access to his email.
Do you think either approach - blunt criticism, or avoidance of such - is more optimal than the other? Many CEOs are famous for being colorful and blunt - Steve Jobs, Herb Kelleher - and I find that very often, I gravitate towards services produced by such people. I don't know about many CEOs that practice the opposite approach, but that's because the opposite is less newsworthy.

I guess what I'm asking is: would you say the net improvement is worth the loss of those exceptions in business relationships?
Have you worn their clothing? Their tri-blend and 50/50 blends are the most comfortable shirts you can buy. Wear one of their shirts and you won't compare them to Wal-Mart again.

And if you don't want to pay retail, just get them on Amazon. You can get yourself a basic shirt for $6 (and the aforementioned tri-blend for $9). There's a reason why a huge number of bands/artists print on AA shirts, they are top end.
gamache, I think he's referring to the AA retail store and the various brightly and unusually coloured offerings inside of it, while you seem to be referring to AA's T-Shirts.

I am the owner of an AA tagged T-shirt; black, with a modest picture of a prinny on it, of good quality. So I see your point about the stuff being "good." But as to what's on display in the retail stores, their "designer fashion" is really truly gawd awful. I wouldn't call it "bland and tasteless" though--it is a full-on assult on one's sensibilities.
UClassify: Create Your Own Text Classifiers
BasicThinking blog now for sale on German ebay
Some details in english here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=423707
Yes, sorry. Haven't used MFC in a long time so it was slip.
A prime example of why Apple needs to overhaul the App store - and the solution
10 Reasons Why "Band" Is Better Than MySpace
I don't know where your Softlayer pricing comes from. We have two 2.33ghz 8 core servers with NAS for just over what you quoted for one 4 core. We're db-heavy though, and not much in the way of file serving so we're lighter on storage (we have 2 73ghz 15kRPM SCSI disks on RAID 1) but that doesn't cost much.

Most startups don't do anything that requires them to significantly scale storage, and if they do the transfer costs on Amazon are huge (though quite possibly still worth it). If you're running Dropbox or Flickr type stuff, Amazon's amazing.

AWS would be an order of magnitude more for startups like us that are basically MySQL-based. There are a lot of us out there.

Interestingly, startups that go the traditional route are limited in that they have to have enough server capacity to meet peak demand on hand 24/7, so for much of the day you're paying for idle servers. I imagine Amazon becomes a lot more price-efficient if you have a high peak to trough traffic ratio.
Palm announces Palm Pre at CES
In the last couple of months, many of my friends and acquaintances have suddenly hopped onto Facebook. They cross the spectrum of education and career experiences, though most tend to be a more thoughtful lot.

It's just anecdote, but I've had a few times where anecdotal experience has presaged an industry trend. Facebook, right now, feels like one of those moments. I may be wrong, but in my life, it has a certain "buzz" at the moment.
CES 2009: Palm Press Conference
Everyone and their dog.
I'm not necessarily saying that AA doesn't "make and promote what is essentially child porn", or that I'm siding with them in any way, but "child porn" is a pretty heavy accusation and you should back it up.

The link you provided doesn't count. First of all, it's on a humor site, and the article definitely seems to belong there. But more importantly, it provides no evidence that the models are underage, the photos it shows don't appear to be me to be of underage girls, the photos aren't quite pornographic anyways (though admittedly fairly close), and it doesn't even provide any evidence that AA attempted to represent them as underage.

I'm completely willing to hear that AA is making child porn--I have no affiliation with them or anything like that--but you haven't provided any evidence and therefore you shouldn't make the claim.
I wanted to also mention that I used the SaaS RailsKit to build this. It was extremely nice not having to mess with any of the account/signup legwork.
http://railskits.com/
I use Dvorak, and have for about two and a half years. At this point, the benefits seem sufficiently obvious that I wouldn't go back to Qwerty. It took me maybe two or three weeks to get reasonably proficient with it, and after a month or so it was a non-issue. (It's a completely different matter if your primary keyboard layout is German or something, though.)

FWIW, I use Emacs (heavily), and Dvorak works quite well with it -- all the C-x C-v C-c C-s etc. stuff isn't all clustered on the left hand, which is usually also the hand pressing Control.

Also, as a data point: I don't have any problem switching between Qwerty and Dvorak as necessary, though now the former feels like a parody of a good keyboard layout. (Seriously. Semicolon, home row. J, home row. Why?)
brutal.

Dear Ex-Friend,
You have been dropped in exchange for a 10th of a $3 burger prepared at a fast food chain by pimply teens. That's right, you're not even worth 30 cents to me. Goodbye. My life is truly, marginally better without you.
Change Your Keyboard Keys With SharpKeys
SharpKeys is simple and small (size:355 KB) software built as a registry hack, which can easily change your keyboard keys. For example, if you accidentally hit Caps Lock often, you could use this utility to map Caps Lock to a Shift key or even turn it off completely. With SharpKeys you can make many interesting things like harmless pranks on your friend’s computer. Just install SharpKeys and change numbers or letters on friends PC and and watch your friend freak out:).
I stopped reading when he misstated everything about Libertarianism:
" 1. Corporations are more “efficient” than the government because of the
“natural selection” of our capitalist system.
2. Corporations are therefore better than the government at everything.
3. Corporations should be the government, or at least in control of it."

This guy obviously not only misunderstands what Libertarism is, or Austrian economics. But also grossly misunderstands the cause of our economic collapse. I tend to trust the scientists that have models that can accurately predict the future: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LfascZSTU4o
We've all seen Speed! You could just put that on a loop.
it kicks!
Those keyboards look absolutely awesome; thank you. :)
The rolling TV screen is less important than the rolling camera.
In case you were wondering what this guy is describing. It's basically our current system of corporatism (where corporations control government) - which is not only the very opposite of Libertarianism, it approaches Fascism.
More info: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ticytEUvVhQ
After reading the article, it sounds like maybe Larry Flynt is making a political statement. (Don't know about that
"Gone Wild" guy.)

Larry made interesting waves when he offered... was it $1MM?, for information confirming illicit sexual activity by members of Congress. If he can use his pulpit to point out the pork barrel nature of the current bail out distributions, more power to him.
Joel on Software: Goals
1. Use rails and ajax
2. Get on techcrunch
3. ????
4. Profit!!
People actually look for music on myspace? Dang. What's the world coming to?
My thoughts:
Most scientists (myself included) tend to prefer models that accurately predict the future: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LfascZSTU4o

What Zed describes is in no way libertarianism. What the following to understand exactly what it is (HINT: It's the opposite of Libertarianism.)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ticytEUvVhQ
Apple releases 2009 proxy statement
Wireless charging seems to be a pretty innovative feature of this phone.
Dvorak. It's not faster but your fingers get a lot less tired. Cured my carpal tunnel syndrome.
Sonar Time Machine: replaying the past of your code quality
Fastest hard drive ever?
Thanks - I'll work on those things
Sorry, I didn't mean to imply that Haskell is only used for writing toy programs. I meant that Haskell people gravitate toward problems that are functional in nature. Many such programs are useful, though rarely in isolation.

If you're wondering where the idea comes from, here's an example. There is a thread on Facebook titled "What have you made using Haskell?"

http://www.facebook.com/topic.php?uid=2213713570&topic=2...

Here are the responses:

1. HAppS (a web thingy)

2. A minesweeper clone

3. A preprocessor for POV-Ray source files

4. A program to prove graph isomorphisms

5. A parser for boolean logic sentences

6. A lambda expression evaluator with alpha equivalence testing

7. A hyperbolic raytracer

8. An image regression program

9. A program that finds equidistant letter sequences

10. A boolean expression to truth table converter

11. A resolution theorem prover

12. An interpreter of a Prolog basic subset

13. A Markov Chain generator

14. An anagram generator

15. A library for doing computation inside various algebraic structures

16. A maze generator and solver

Some of these are exercises, some are toys, some look potentially useful. But except for the first two, they are all pure-functional problems, and are rather abstract. Maybe this sample isn't representative of all Haskell usage or what Haskell is capable of, but the stereotype, like most stereotypes, exists for a reason.
> security questions are what not to do

Yeah. Personally I always put long random strings into them because I don't want someone to guess my answers.
Standing on the shoulders of giants. And cashing out.
Usually I agree with you on profanity. But in this case, I think its irony (in light of Zed's recent history) is amusing and actually has a point. In fact I the thought of writing a profanity-laced blog post as a rebuttal to this article actually crossed my mind.
Ask HN: Have you seen any open source HN clones?
I found this Indian one:

http://www.garamkabar.com/

But it doesn't have threaded comments like HN. That seems to miss the whole point.

Has anyone seen an authentic open source clone with the two key features: voting and threaded comments?
Business Plan Pro is AMAZING :-)
I wonder what he does for a living that he can pull all this stuff together in his free time?
How do you do database backups?
http://github.com/teej/alchemy/tree/master
Man, these guys are really awesome. The first episode is really high quality. I'm digging some of those other bands as well. Definitely one to keep my eye on as I've never heard of these guys before.
Can you give an example? Things like the ISC dhcpd.conf are declarative, and the advantage that it "looks" like a programming language is that it's easy to read and see/form dependencies for complex setups--it's not just a big list of key/value pairs. That makes sense for a tool with a lot of capabilities. A quick glance at /etc doesn't reveal anything other than structured declarative files, key/value pairs, or delimited. There's a been a trend to use XML recently, which I find to be overly verbose for a configuration file, but even the XML-esque format that Apache uses is pretty much just a big list of key/value pairs.
I take Roger Ehrenberg's viewpoint about the hedge fund industry and transfer it over to VC capital: it's turning into a barbell. The probability of getting either seed stage or a huge investment is much higher than anything in the middle. It's going to depend on the underlying business and expectations of growth, and there's also capital management and psychological factors, but my guess is that trend will continue.
posix, it still doesn't support enough posix to make all the tools I use in linux natively available. so long as I need cygwin or msys for git, it won't be good enough.
I admit to not knowing how the Windows registry's various parts are protected. But individual files/directories can be protected separately on Unix-like systems (whether they are is another question).

If the Unix root user is not enabled, especially for remote access, and assuming you don't have access to the physical device, then it's a question of which Unix accounts and groups you do have access to. Also, technically directory write permission is all that's needed to compromise a Unix file, so all files in the same directory are equally vulnerable. (Even this assumes base permissions and not ACLs, etc.)
Yes, they do. It's the de facto directory for music. This should be a little better.
The animation framework is called motion. The unit test framework is called lotion. You know, to keep you from getting burned.

The language partisans will have slavish devotion.
Who IS this guy and how is he so productive and awesome?
I would have never believed it without seeing it with my own eyes in my own programs, but Haskell's B&D type system really helps a lot in producing correct programs.

I am a relatively incompetent Haskell programmer and I am constantly amazed at how often algorithms I implement turn out correctly after I finally get them to compile.

It's an exaggeration to say that you must embed a proof of anything in your program. You just have to think a bit more carefully and explicitly about how your data is defined.
HN is open source itself. Are you looking for a clone specifically?
Myspace really does suck if you're trying to find good music. I usually just end up browsing through pages and pages of junk. Every now and then I'll find an okay one. Rarely do I find an awesome band. This "Band" show could be good.
link is broken both from here as well as your own website. very interested in reading when it's fixed. thank you.
and the Rack-port: Crack!
FWIW, I use Emacs more than vim, but don't find the jcvp to be awkward. cv is down/up and jp is rocking the right hand left and right. Were j and p swapped, it would be annoying (pressing the left one to go right), but I think it's fine.

Maybe an improvement over hjkl, which is always one letter off from touch-typing.
Reddit is open source.

http://code.reddit.com/
I'd be willing to bet that most people don't encounter horizontal scrolling on a regular basis. At least I sure hope not; it's hella annoying. The only cases where I can think of it coming up (for a full page, at least) is when there is an over-sized image or on the occasional artsy site where it's designed that way intentionally. Perhaps horizontal scrolling comes up more often for people using small screens--on a netbook or phone or something--but even then I imagine it's fairly rare.

The use case? Inline comments, feedback boxes, contact info, control panels, really anything you want to have immediately available but out of the way most of the time. Is this the best way to implement those? Not always, of course, but probably enough to warrant its existence.
Absolutely, we are. But Denmark is, along with the rest of "old Europe" going to wake up pretty soon and realize that the half bln. Chinese and Indian citizens that are moving into the middle class these years, are going to send their kid to college, and the white collar jobs are going to go the same way the blue collar jobs did over the past 20 years.

Without a strong focus on wealth creation, instead of the constant preaching to the mediocre and the "good enough", we're not going to have much to show once the Chinese and Indians get started.

In short: Prosperity is not a goal to attain, it's a continuous effort, and we just stopped trying.
The general opinion was that Vista was inferior to Tiger upon release, and Leopard annihilates Tiger on most things.

Now, Windows is playing catch-up. They need not only to fix Vista but to add improvements. The ones they are adding still mostly fall into the Leopard blanket of feature, with the exception of the patently bizarre "half-window" feature. Apple, meanwhile, is calling Snow Leopard a speed tweak: they're reducing filesize, adding Exchange support, and improving their Quicktime codecs for native filetype support. In other words, they're closing the window and removing vulnerabilities. Everybody thinks Apple has the superior featureset, and if they're also faster and sturdier and have business support, then they have a legitimate chance of getting the vast upper hand here.

I think Microsoft is learning from their mistakes, but they're learning slowly. It'll take them a long time to clean out the muckiness of their operating system and create something as minimal as OS X. And, from what I've seen of Windows 7, they're still not going at it the right way.
Maybe it will attract special effects houses, but the killer will be bandwidth. I suspect there will be better PC rendering engines before they get this thing going.
Wow, the technical and artistic output by him is amazing. I'd love it if he wrote a bit about how he operates, what his interests are and etc but I somehow feel that is outside his character.
I'm a bit biased, but I think the platform is the thing that will have the most impact. JavaScript/HTML/CSS makes porting web apps ridiculously easy, and most of the apps I use these days are web apps.
Where is the code available from?