skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So did he drop the persona at the end of the post or at the beginning? Because he still sounded pretty damn stern and macho when he mentioned tearing down entire language communities with a single post; and I've been on the internet so long I've seen the "ha ha you actually BELIEVED all the outrageous stuff I said loudly and defended to my last breath? Oh, you poor, pathetic saps. You poor, poor, pathetic, pathetic, gullible saps" routine a million times.
I can't believe someone at BBC News wrote "Wi-fi go bye bye". Have they been seconded from CBeebies?
I can't bring myself to be uncharitable today, but I have to say I'll be very surprised if Zed stops writing rants. I am... very skeptical. I've seen this exact same drama played out on a dozen forums and community sites.
He has the contrast between Reddit and HN right.
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And 11-Year-Old Becomes Network Admin for Alabama School

http://news.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/03/30/1443202
Who is this person and why do I care?
Missed the point.

Obviously they want you to use the money that way, but that's the only thing you should use it for, you should not use to get more money.

But if you provided a service (not something for nothing), then it's like any other business.
Eh, I don't see that reddit is worse. For one, this article isn't at the top of the programming subreddit. The comments here are better though.
About section:

http://www.zedshaw.com/

I don't know you well enough to answer the second part of the question.
Amusingly enough, a lot of Zed's blog posts never actually seem to be voted up on Reddit, and this one was posted and voted up here before it was on Reddit.

http://www.reddit.com/search?q=zedshaw&sort=new
I don't understand why I'm meant to care about a troll promising to stop trolling.
On one hand, I don't like to let myself be flattered, especially when I have no idea how sincere the flattery is.

On the other: you like us? All right, c'mon, group hug.
Indeed. People give money to charities because they want to help a cause, not because they want to help the chief executive get paid lots of money.
I think part of the fear regarding for-profit aid organizations is this: the pursuit of profit will create an incentive for organizations to follow the money.

As a result, more resources would be allocated for the problems in more wealthy nations (ie. cancer), while problems in poorer regions would be neglected (ie. maleria). The same problem would exist even within a nation through existing class divisions.

While this schism already exists today, an increase of for-profit aid organizations/charities will probably exacerbate this divide.

In the end, this discussion opens a whole host of ethical issues and philosophical questions. Life is rarely simple.
axod: Congrats! :)

the rest: why not use mibbit or any other IRC client for #startups on freenode?
I agree with Hoff that creating value is better than blaming. OTOH an occasional rant might make us all feel a little better while we're creating all that value. :-)
Base flattery works.

Troll and Man’s Man™ are different beasts. But trolling works too.

I doubt that C++ or Lisp's success has anything to do with stern looks.
At an old job, I interviewed a few hundred programmers for Windows jobs. Almost every single MSCP could recite .NET esoterica from the test, but could not write a for loop. I am not exaggerating. Eventually I started screening out MSCP's. That test is awful. Getting a MSC* cert is the weak last gasp of the failed professional programmer. It is Rock Bottom. There is nothing left after getting an MSCP, except possibly becoming a comment troll on Jeff Atwood's blog. Nothing makes me more pleased to have left Windows development than the fact that I will never have to have another awkward interview with a "certified professional."

(I am guessing this girl is legitimately bright--you can't blame a 9 year old for not knowing these ugly facts.)
Zed, i wish you the best of luck, and hope you find new and creative ways to wreak havoc on the internet!
The makings of a media mogul: Michael Arrington of TechCrunch
Kragen was referring to my nasty experience with them, which I haven't published yet since I wanted to get all my data off before criticizing them.
A History of U.S. Communications Security
I think any non-toy language needs to make it non-painful to program in several paradigms, but I'm not sure about the "comfortably" part; it's good for a langauge to be designed around a central paradigm that can work for most tasks and that the implementor can optimize for. So Python is OO and Haskell is functional, and there are many problems that you solve in an OO style when writing Python and a functional style when using Haskell, and that's OK. And every once in a while you need to write functional-style code in Python, or OO-style code in Haskell, and that's OK too. I'm OK, you're OK, we're all OK....
I honestly love this show, especially when Charlie has an opportunity to interview for an hour straight, uninterrupted.

It is very difficult to spit out crafted sound bites and PR scripts, when you're under the camera for a hour. And even if that happens, it certainly reveals something about the guest's ability to BS.
Brain Reorganizes To Make Room For Math
Print news is fading, but the content lives on
I knew as soon as this popped up in my feed reader that it would be the top link on HN because it's very flattering, not that there's anything wrong with that.
Samsung Shipped Infected Digital Picture Frames
One tip is to avoid putting your wallet in your back pocket and sitting on it. This tilts your pelvis a tiny bit that adds up over time, and can lead to lower back pain.

Another thing that is helping is that our employer signed us all up for virgin health miles. Just having a simple pedometer and the ability to track how much you walk in a day is getting more and more people out of their chairs (at least at our office).
http://www.virginhealthmiles.com/
How do you know if your conditon is rare enough to be included without going to the site and checking their index of communities?

When the site first opened I requested them to include a separate community for RSI/carpal tunnel syndrome although it is not exactly rare since it affects about 10% of the US population. Although I never received a response I now see a general "Nerve Entrapment" community which includes other disorders similar to RSI. That community has a single member. Instead, had they allowed this, I might have pointed people there from other RSI forums on the web.

I thought the idea behind rareshare had the potential for much greater growth than they have seen - with only 2000 monthly uniques currently. And I think making editorial decisions about which groups should exist and which ones should not indicates that the spirit in which the site was created is more of a throwback to old media rather than enacting the web 2.0 idea about the individual taking control of the medium.
Best luck, Zed.
This is awesome - congrats axod. More companies/startups should take pride in profitability [and tell HN about it dammit! :) ].

Enjoy the reverse burn rate & positive cash flow in 2009.
No, PG is always like that.
I support broad and deep transparency as a complement to judicious taxation and regulation. Put the data out there, where independent and competitive interests can mine it. I'm not informed enough (nor, perhaps, wise enough) to propose the details of such an approach, but it seems to me a good area for increased competition. This would include lowering/removing the barriers to general, public participation. There will be fruitcakes, but also, I suspect, significant cooperative efforts.

To over-simplify into a slogan: If Visa can analyse my every purchase, I don't see why I shouldn't be able and enabled to do the same of them.
Very nice, profitable boot strapped startup.
"This kind of crap is very common there"... well the article definitely says that she broke a world record. How can that be a common feat?

The way I look at it, her parents are trying to show her the best path possible and use her skills (memorizing thirukkural when you are 3 is awesome, 1330 couplets ).

It certainly did not turn out so bad in Tiger Wood's case...
I'd bet not, actually. The lost decade in Japan was due to unique structural problems in the Japanese economy. The current recession is just a classic speculative bubble. A bad one, certainly, but not qualitatively different from the speculative bubbles the west has been bouncing back from since the 17th century.
The same thing happened to me. I had a nice Aeron and desk, but had moved to the couch with the laptop for several day hacking sessions. I wasn't as afflicted as you, but it was extremely unpleasant. My diet wasn't bad, but my posture was.

Invest in (and take advantage of) a proper work environment!
From the sound of it Zed isn't going to stop writing rants... he's going to stop existing!

I don't find that so hard to believe. Artificial personalities can get addictive, but spending time in Zed's head must get tedious fast.
Dcurtis was actually the one who suggested the Christmas colors.
Agreed. I really like his take on the music industry too.
Well, MCP just means you've passed one or more certification exams. My current employer is a gold partner with MS, and as a result, we need to have 2+ people with "higher" certifications, such as MCSD, MCAD or MCPD. It saves our company about $50k/year in software licensing. And even though our company hands out a $500 bonus per test passed (plus reimbursement of test and prep materials, and another $1k-1500 for each certification level achieved), only 2 of us at the office are "bothering" to keep updating our certifications/credentials. The other guys say they're "interested" but I think they're holding out for more money.
I think allocating money properly would be creating value. Deciding were to invest could be one of the most important decisions possible. That many finance types might have been involved in something else is another matter.

Even if you want to manufacture stuff, you have to somehow organize the manufacturing. To say only manufacturing is worthwhile seems a bit shortsighted. Suppose all the finance guys would go to GM and work in their factories assembling cars, would it help much?
There's no way they won't sell you the parts. Not being on the catalog or website or whatever is pretty irrelevant. You would think he'd know this.

Also, you can always have someone make some for you, couldn't be that expensive.
So right now, the only revenue comes from adsense, right?

Judging by his stats, the website is still very small, hopefully for him, it will continue to grow. Congrats!
"it strengthens your core."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9TS3xP-tOWM
If someone really wanted to, alot of this could be automated. Ofcourse, there probably already are such bots (unfortunately)
no denial about speculative bubble but with abysmal savings, lack of educational resources, and near certain evaporation of low skilled jobs not sure - when it bounces back to what level it can go and how sustainable bounce back will be.. fundamental problems must be acknowledged and tackled..
Idunno about that. I skiptrace dates before I meet them for fun+safety. I don't use any pay services, just freely accessible info. I learn all kinds of useful things. Social networking makes the information that much more detailed.
Intresting. This also indicates that teaching kids math is a good idea.
This is not some small licensing detail; it's their entire revenue stream. Cilk++ is basically a compiler. Normally the compiler license doesn't affect your software that is compiled with the compiler, but if Cilk Arts allowed people to compile proprietary code with the free version of their compiler, there'd be no reason to pay them at all.

BTW, I think ICC has a similar provision.
The biggest difference between email and social network viruses is that the social networks are centralized, and should (theoretically) be able to easily block these viruses by just banning certain destination URLs.

Or is this not so easy? If not, please explain.
It is a fair comparison tptacek. For years the canonical sentiment about Hong Kong in Britain (where it is relatively easy to get permission to work on the island) has been that it is an economic backwater suitable only for those who cannot make it back home. There was even a derogatory acronym in common parlance to describe the people who went to work there: F.I.L.T.H. (Failed in London, Tried Hong Kong).

Asserting that Hong Kong is a city on par with New York or London is going against years of perception to the opposite, mostly driven by the higher wages for the financial class in Western financial centers. That said, unless someone speaks mandarin these days, they are not likely to find the sorts of opportunities that previously existed in Hong Kong. One of the great things about the island is that it's always been a working city, and it is reorienting to mainland markets quickly.
Yup, they're all numerical algorithms (er, at least almost all; I haven't checked anything like every single one). They started out in the ACM Transactions on Mathematical Software. The amount of information you get along with the code is variable, but often small. The code is all too frequently in FORTRAN, too, especially (of course) in the older algorithms. But there's some very good stuff in there.
The second Great Depression has arrived … - Paul Krugman
You ever have a moment when you see something slightly idiosyncratic and it brings you back to all kinds of memories and reminiscing? Getting one of those. Wishing I was in Japan right now, eating chutoro nigiri, with mochi for dessert, having tea, and going to an onsen.
Erlang vs. Stackless Python: a first benchmark
If someone can tell me how to disable autoplay of video in Firefox, I would be grateful.
Wow, kick ass. Now I don't need to worry about downloading an IRC client when I'm programming in the library and need to troubleshoot. Kick ass.
Very interesting. Thanks for the TED link. But is there a reason why he is not showing an actual crow dropping a coin in the box? All he shows is a drawing and then he describes what happens.
From Wikipedia:

Intelligence

As a group, the crows show remarkable examples of intelligence, and Aesop's fable of The Crow and the Pitcher shows that humans have long viewed the crow as an intelligent animal. Crows and ravens often score very highly on intelligence tests. Certain species top the avian IQ scale. Crows in the northwestern U.S. show modest linguistic capabilities and the ability to relay information over great distances, live in complex, hierarchic societies involving hundreds of individuals with various "occupations", and have an intense rivalry with the area's less socially advanced ravens. Wild hooded crows in Israel have learned to use bread crumbs for bait-fishing. Crows will engage in a kind of mid-air jousting, or air-"chicken" to establish pecking order.

One species, the New Caledonian Crow, has also been intensively studied recently because of its ability to manufacture and use its own tools in the day-to-day search for food, including dropping seeds into a heavy trafficked street and waiting for a car to crush them open. On October 5, 2007, researchers from the University of Oxford, England presented data acquired by mounting tiny video cameras on the tails of New Caledonian Crows. It turned out that they use a larger variety of tools than previously known, plucking, smoothing and bending twigs and grass stems to procure a variety of foodstuffs. Crows in Queensland Australia have learned how to eat the toxic cane toad by flipping the cane toad on its back and violently stabbing the throat where the skin is thinner, allowing the crow to access the non-toxic innards; their long beaks ensure that all of the innards can be removed.
A partial workaround that could be deployed immediately is on the feature-request thread here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=235923

The ideal behavior, where PRE blocks are clipped (with scrollbars) at exactly each reader's own viewport width, seems to require a DIV-based rather than a TABLE-based layout.
Need that New TV Wall Mounted? | TechJaws
Predictions for Google's 2009
Well my dad bought a color Macintosh II for $9,000 so I'd say the prices were moderately comparable. It's crazy to think how expensive computers were back in the day. And $9,000 in 1980's currency is probably like buying a $18,000 computer today. With that much money, you could buy nine 1U fully decked 8-core machines today.
Microsoft is friendlier to developers, but the development environment in windows is not so friendly. The one major reason that I own a MacBook is due to the BSD development environment, I'd have to run vmware or colinux on a windows machine to get the equivalent feel. And no, cygwin just doesn't cut it.
Just out of curiosity... Based on your comments, there seems to be something going on between you and Zed. Was there some incident?
I'm curious here, too. I didn't dig in too deeply, but I see exactly 1 ad unit at the top of the home page, no premium features for sale, etc.

I'd be interested in stats on ad units and CTR (which I've always heard is really low on communication apps).

edit: Would also be interested in definition of profitability... Covering hardware/software costs? Covering costs PLUS able to eat ramen? Covering costs plus paying yourself a market salary?
It will be a good follow-up area of research to see how much of that brain reorganization from early childhood to adulthood can be influenced by experience, that is by good education. Here's a link

http://www.amazon.com/Knowing-Teaching-Elementary-Mathematic...

to a very informative book about math education and how it can be better. I strongly suspect the brain reorganization happens better and faster for learners with good math teachers rather than lousy math teachers.
Thanks all, it's been a fun time so far, lots and lots to do to take Mibbit mainstream, but it's really nice to know I don't have to shell out more money for bandwidth.

The bandwidth usage before I did work on optimization was around 3TB transfer a month, which can cost.

BTW Thanks everyone on HN, especially those who contributed to my first post about Mibbit. It was harsh, and afterwards I almost gave up on the idea, but sometimes you need that kick.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=83660

It's actually quite nice being a lone founder... nothing that makes you more determined to succeed than being the underdog.

The other interesting stat I forgot to mention, is that Mibbit has about 3-4 times as many users online as Meebo Rooms at any point. I'm quite pleased about that, lots of room for growth though.
Most of the advertising comes from contextual advertising once in the chat. Also with the widget that other websites use.

The advertising revenue isn't massive yet, ($4 figures/month), but it's something to build on.

There's also obviously people willing to pay for chat/communication - campfire, liveperson type services.
So the money is from advertising? May be needless to say but it isn't clear.
Are C++ and Lisp successful?

C++ doesn't seem so popular in the last decade. Lisp was That Language That Abuse Was Written In to a lot of people.
A troll is someone who's just trying to get a reaction, but hasn't actually contributed anything worthwhile.

Zed has obviously contributed a lot, and was being trolled by the Ruby community (know what 'fuzed' stands for?) before he started ZSFA.
The point is that the direct link to 'C-h b' is mentioned in the tutorial. That section of the tutorial also has sections on a few of the options in C-h.

That is how pivo found it. By going "oh, I wonder what else is there" and hitting C-h ?

If you're not the type of person that does stuff like that, emacs probably isn't the editor for you. Hell, software development probably isn't for you.

Yeah, emacs is large - and has lots of features. Once you've been through the tut, and spent a few days with the editor, they're quite discoverable. It does make the assumption that you want to discover though.
It's quantified BTW if you're interested in traffic/users etc

http://www.quantcast.com/mibbit.com

These things are all relative of course, so it's big compared to lots of websites, small compared to the others :/
Fear mongering among the investor class, sweeping generalizations to prove that Obama is going to screw up. For example, he thinks giving money to banks was a good idea, but asking them to lend it is bad. I thought the whole idea of the bailout was to resolve the liquidity crisis. Without lending you still have a liquidity crisis. And the article is a little short on alternative policies.
I'm taking a class on psychological development of mathematics in children next quarter. I'll bump the thread and keep y'all posted.
There are two unresolved issues that I see.

Contributions to for profit companies are not tax deductible. This may cause some to give to other charities instead.

Not for profit charities are required to disclose financial information. Sites such as Charity Navigator allow you to investigate such charities. For profit charities are not subject to such regulations.
If an organization is turning a profit for its owners or shareholders then it's a business, not a charity. That's a definition, not a moral judgment.

There are lots of businesses that do good work for people. The tricky part is when you're soliciting for donations, you just need to be extremely transparent about where the money is going.

What we need is not a rethinking of what a charity can be, but a rethinking of what a business can be.
Obviously people aren't very aware of how much the CEOs of various not for profits make. The CEO of United Way for instance makes over $500K. All of this can be investigated on Charity Navigator.
I usually think of peanut butter as fat, not protein. Does it really have a sufficient amount of protein?
Got an iPhone for Christmas? Here's what to load it up with
It's an editorial, not a dissertation. Not every piece of persuasive writing requires footnotes.
Congrats. I've enjoyed hearing about your progress over the past year.
> I don't understand why anybody considers profit evil if said profit is not gotten through fraud or coercion.

For example, Marx said that more capitalism logically leads to subsistence living conditions for the workers. He gave arguments for this. I think they are mistaken, but if you are wondering why people think profit is evil, that's a reason. Marx said that without fraud or coercion, and just free trade, most people will have very bad lives.

And, yes, obviously one can live in the US for a lot less than minimum wage, and be doing a lot better than the subsistence conditions Marx had in mind from his own time period. So Marxism is blatantly, factually inapplicable to the US (whether that's b/c Marxism is false, or b/c the US has been saved by it's non-pure capitalism with govt intervention is not obvious just from the plain facts). Why people are blind to this is a tough question.
He said that Lisp isn't popular because it doesn't have the stern looks...