skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Okay, let me try to respond in a different way. Supposing I fully accept the idea that global warming is a genuine phenomenon and that the aggregate of human activities is its main cause, why is it valuable to me to stop it? What benefit do I and similarly situated persons gain from carbon taxes, mandatory sequestration, restrictions on the use of certain technologies, or whatever else is proposed as a means of preventing anthropogenic global warming? Please note that I am not asking "Why would I support reducing global warming if I had magical powers?" but rather, "Given currently foreseeable technology at currently foreseeable costs, are the political and economic arrangements necessary to slow global warming worth as much to humankind as devoting time, effort, and money to solving other pressing problems?"
I do not see why you must lower the build quality in order to lower the cost. Yes, lowering the build quality saves money in the short-term, but there are other ways to save money, no? As they're learning now, going the low quality route is actually very expensive (unprofitable) in the long-term.

Have you compared the big three and their Japanese rivals in terms of their manufacturing process?
How would you define ruthlessness I guess? I mean, I can name a lot of YC startups that are crushing their competitors by relentlessly making better products. From my batch alone there is Disqus (whose product is significantly better and gained much more traction than their closest competitor, Intense Debate) and Dropbox. They've both taken a lead over a field of entrants in terms of innovation.

I mean, they haven't thrown any bricks through their competitors' windshields, but they haven't passed up any chances to make their competitors look half-baked.
This is great! i recommend 'startup.com' too, a great little documentary.
I've read about three different biographies about Bill Gates. But, again: Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos et al. did not become famous from writing code. They may have written code at some point, but it isn't what made them successful. They made their fortunes by doing other things that occasionally drew on their technical skills.

The difference between you and I, is that you look at these successful people, and want to expand the definition of "programmer" to include them, because they once did some programming. I think that's silly. Programmers are the guys who work for these successful businessmen, cranking out code from 9 to 5. Guys like Gates and Bezos have job descriptions that are far more expansive and influential than that of even the most senior software engineers.

(Oh...for the record? Knowledge of journalism would serve a lot of startups well in their eternal search for PR. The industry of print journalism may be dying, but the craft is alive and well.)
Yeah, it's a shame this part of math gets focused on so much. However, that doesn't mean there aren't cool tricks that are handy to know. For instance, to this day I still multiply 2-digit numbers mentally by using difference of squares, just by doing a*b = ((a+b)/2)^2 - ((a-b)/2)^2 (assuming a > b and a+b is even, otherwise cut one of the numbers by 1 and add it back in in the end). This immediately reduces doing two digit multiplication into doing two digit squaring, for which there are some additional techniques (or just brute memorization), so at the minimum you get a 100-fold decrease in required memorization (and likely more). Of course, the above formula is always true, though it gets less usable for higher digits and hopefully most of us can do one digit multiplication in our heads already =)
Why Apple will be the next Sony
It's from 1996: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triumph_of_the_Nerds
No, but even if that's true, is it really fair or, in the long term, sustainable, to give the Japanese a $2,000 head start? You're requiring our companies to innovate away $2,000 worth of overhead just to achieve parity. Even if they accomplish that, the Japanese are just as bright as us and they'll do it right back.

And The Toyota Way was published 5 years ago and was a snapshot of the industry years before that. I promise you people at GM have read it too. I wouldn't deny that Toyota has probably done better until more recently, and that their actions therefore gave them more than the $2,000 edge. But $2,000 is more than enough to win.

I'm not trying to suggest that that $2,000 is the only problem, just that it's one that is insurmountable, and therefore needs to be fixed.
You make some interesting points and I will definitely hunt down the "Golden Fetters" piece. However I would ask whether you have looked into the argument that gold restricts the ability of the gov't to expand, in that there is a built-in expense to more spending when you have a gold-backed currency.

It appears (to me and probably others) that part of the current problems the USA is facing is due to a govt that grows and grows, without a method to have a feedback loop that would restrict it - currently it seems the answer is to just print (electronically or physically) more $100 bills (which cost about 4 cents to make).
Sockpuppet?

I'm not sure where your hostility is coming from -- I think that link sufficiently answers the question asked. I didn't make any comment about one philosophy of business over any other.
Networking Tips: Be a shining star and maximize your time meeting new people
has links to some nice fonts too ;)
Friendship is Relative
Also Recommended: Gates, by Manes and Andrews. It doesn't score high on a literary scale but it really captures the thrill of starting a company. It also covers the partnerships between MS and Apple without passing judgment.
R4 DS
DS nds nintendo DS R4 DS Revolution for DS / DS Lite.
I never heard of that one, thanks for the recommendation!
Increasing Your Website’s Visibility Using Free Classifieds Site
One of the main purposes of having a website is to increase the online visibility of your business. This simply means that more people should come to know about the business through its website so that the customer base will increase. However, visitors will not be able to come to know about your website as soon as it is launched. Your website must feature in the search results when users search the worldwide web for the services that they need.
And every car, every tv, every pair of jeans, every pet, etc.
Still beats my Christmas bonus. When you're self-employed, the bosses are so miserly.
You would hope that someone writing an introductory guide like this would have emphasized that it's basically trivial to add new shards for the first two options, whereas it's a pain, or at least trickier (you could block all inserts briefly and change the auto-increment offset and current auto-increment value in each shard), with the third option. Sharding without a plan to add more shards seems unwise, unless you have a really good idea of what kind of usage you're expecting in the foreseeable future. It's all discussed in the comments but personally I think it would have been worth explicit mention in the post itself.
I'm not sure if it's what you meant, but I found this:

Perhaps it was commercialization in the 1980s that killed off the next expected new thing. Our plan and our hope was that the next generation of kids would come along and do something better than Smalltalk around 1984 or so. We all thought that the next level of programming language would be much more strategic and even policy-oriented and would have much more knowledge about what it was trying to do. But a variety of different things conspired together, and that next generation actually didn’t show up. One could actually argue—as I sometimes do—that the success of commercial personal computing and operating systems has actually led to a considerable retrogression in many, many respects.

You could think of it as putting a low-pass filter on some of the good ideas from the ’60s and ’70s, as computing spread out much, much faster than educating unsophisticated people can happen. In the last 25 years or so, we actually got something like a pop culture, similar to what happened when television came on the scene and some of its inventors thought it would be a way of getting Shakespeare to the masses. But they forgot that you have to be more sophisticated and have more perspective to understand Shakespeare. What television was able to do was to capture people as they were.

So I think the lack of a real computer science today, and the lack of real software engineering today, is partly due to this pop culture.

http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~sue/475/AlanKay.html

(Edit: I just saw that this was from a 2005 interview, so it can't be what you were referring to.)
Jackpot: Penthouse Porn IPO to Pay for Adult FriendFinder Founder's Car
I also totally recommend Download: The True Story of Internet, It is a 4 part series.

http://www.tv.com/download-the-true-story-of-the-internet/sh...
Agreed- they should cancel the union contracts and fire all the managers that signed them now. GM has 96000 workers paying the inflated health care costs of over 1M people. That just doesn't provide any competitive possibilities.

Still, it's far deeper than wages and costs.

What about the costs to the company for the warranty repairs? The big 3 were offering some very long term warranties for a while. If the sort of quality you are talking about is durability, that could end up increasing costs.

The big 3 approach to reducing costs has been inferior to the Toyota approach. The restrictive UAW work rules limit the flexibility of the work force and devalue overall productivity. They should compare the throughput and excess inventory of the manufacturers. You will see that GM makes too much too slowly, and thus can't respond to demand in a pull based manner as well as Toyota.

The money should go to startup car companies. BYD is valued at 2.5B and they have a huge cell phone battery business. For 15B we could easily start 10 car companies. Invest in the real future.
Today, the best way to compete is to focus on cooperation, not competition. The behavior you're admiring isn't very effective when looking to cooperate with others.
It's widely acknowledged among groups of boys that girls are the whinier sex.
Midnight Flowers Delivery|Midnight Cake Delivery|Gifts Delivery to India Midnight
Midnight Flowers Delivery, Midnight Cake Delivery, Gifts Delivery to India Midnight, Fresh Flowers to India Midnight Delivery, Late Night Flowers, Cake Delivery, Midnight Flowers / Cakes Delivery in India.
You can read more about this in Cooties 29:5881-5889.
"Boy" is also an insult (to a girl or a man or a woman).
Note that storage redundancy is four. I wasn't expecting that, damn.

So (without the administration cost guess) you can get four copies at $0.72/GB/year.
I thought you were BackType Alerts' #1 Fan ;(
Is Social Security a Ponzi Scheme?
Didn't work for the music companies.
great stuff!! this does sound like a 2005 evolution on the original thought/quote I was trying to hunt down.
thanks!
Rumsfeld's Rules
My Toshiba started dying long before its 3-year warranty was up. The cooling fans would make this god-awful grinding noise (bad bearings, I worked in a fan factory FFS), yet they refused repair, stating that cooling fans were part of normal wear and tear.

When my MBP died earlier this month I called Apple, and without any hassle whatsoever, they volunteered to replace it with a brand new unibody model.

What a world of difference in service. BTW, Toshiba charged more for the extended warranty than AppleCare.
If someone reads only one part of that page, it should be:

Why work 8 hours/day for someone else when you can work 16 hours/day for yourself?

If you think it's a dumb question because the answer is obvious, you've got the right mindset. If you think it's a serious question, stick to your day job.
How Apple screwed up AppleTV
Is 'john' a puppet account for you?
What are your goals for 2009?
My major goal is to do a better job balancing family, work and exercise.
Play the Credit Crunch with this Economist Board Game
Fair enough. That's context that we don't get when your comments are cross-posted here.

That said, I still feel bad for the guy who posted the original comment: he wanted some advice on what to do next, and got called a little girl.
It does have a lot in common with one- except I am legally obligated to pay in because other people were conned. People are getting paid by new investors, and I guess the whole plan was kick started with people getting payments despite not paying in. The other striking thing is that the government has been siphoning off the excess investment for years, instead of saving it for when people need it. The whole plan is about to get payment heavy, and I hope it changes soon before I have to pay much more in. I don't plan to be able to get anything out.

I really don't buy the author's assumption of infinite growth. Also, the comments on that site are completely batshit insane. So many people are incredibly angry at "corporations".
I'm 22. I've never expected to have a pension, and that's fine by me - I'll work until I can't anymore, and save the whole way for that eventuality.

All the more important to find something I love doing, so that I can keep cranking code when I'm 70 :)

That or try and get rich, so I can have a retirement :)
lambda logo reminds me half life.
I also found that reading Mint.com's "Privacy and Security" FAQs raised more questions than it answered.

How do they "ask for your online banking user name and passwords" but not 'see' the information (as they claim)? They must be finessing the meaning of 'see'.

Who are these "online financial service providers" where my "online banking credentials are stored"? They aren't named, but the wording suggests they are someone other than either Mint itself or my own financial institutions. If these are the most important link in the chain -- the place where my credentials are stored! -- I have a right to know who they are.
TACP? The Art of C Programming? Tactical Air Control Party?

I am not hackeeish enough I think.
Remember the old days? Web 0.1 Memories
I am very well aware that everyone on HN knows that quote and that it was mis-referenced.

Then as far as I'm concerned you wasted our time.
Out of curiosity, have they turned a profit yet? Last I heard, they were still getting more funding from selling shares.
yup, thats true.
I would be very surprised if Lincoln said this. It doesn't sound like a 19th century thought to me at all. Notice how all the garbage fake quote sites out there never cite any references?
iTunes didn't work?
Having only a single auto-increment column with sharding is likely a bad idea to begin with. In most DBs, (not MySQL I think), the engine uses a specialized setup to hand out the next value in line globally so that while the auto-increment column will be unique, it will be slow. In MySQL, I think they use some sort of special table and mark the rows as they get used up (I could be wrong. I don't usually use MsSQL). Thus, on a MySQL DB, it is possible to get incorrect behavior when changing something in the middle of transactions. So, adding in shards with auto-increment in MySQL could turn bad very quickly and very silently.
I have a Thinkpad from the last generation before the branding switched to Lenovo... pieces of plastic are falling off but the hardware is going strong.
Search Engine Optimization India
SEO Services by Company based in India offering affordable Search Engine Optimization Service including Link Building, online Internet Marketing Search Engine Ranking Services since 1999.
Perhaps $180 is the raw cost of the phone?
Oh I would never suggest that the wages are the only Union-induced problems. There's a whole laundry list of them. It's just the easiest one to tackle.
I disagree. It's more depressing than sinister. Getting people to buy more frozen pizza is what passes for sinister at the economist?
Yeah, they've been a lot of fun lately. And even when they weren't, it was my fault for doing them wrong, so I can't complain there.
I've recently rediscovered the library. All the latest stuff including CDs, DVDs and video games. Sure, there's a waitlist for some of the more popular items, but you can't beat the price.
My kid brother went to work for the phone company straight out of high school('68), back when it was the phone company. He hasn't changed employers since, although he's changed divisions, and his employer has changed names a few times ;-) Of course, he started out as a lineman/installer, and he's now a senior consultant racking up 100K international frequent flyer miles per year.
Beware of Online Job Scams
Some of us are desperate to find some online jobs to make some quick money. We surf the internet everyday for hours together hoping to find some reliable methods of making money online. While making such searches you will come across thousands and thousands of websites that will promise to make you a millionaire in 30 days. Some of them will tell you can make $5000 in a week, some will tell you that you do not have to work at all but you can still make hundreds of dollars everyday using their system. There are other websites that will tell you that you need to work just one or two hours a day to make thousands of dollars every month.
Mint uses Yodlee

Here's one take on it,
http://www.brokegradstudent.com/mint-myths-debunked/
They wish. The UAW has a complete monopoly over their labor resources. In the case of a bankruptcy, the courts would have trashed those idiotic work contracts and brought in something more in line with their competitors. Bankruptcy would have also gotten rid of the dealer safeguards the are currently preventing the 3 from downsizing (shutting down a dealership usually means that said dealership needs to be bought out -- very expensive but the fact that GM has been doing this for the last several years shows how desperate they are to downsize their US operation).

With the bailout, all that pressure is gone. The only real way GM et al. have a way of pressuring the UAW now is to convince the UAW that they are willing to go out of business to turn a profit... no longer a credible threat because the next congress will happily bail out the UAW for the chance to waste more money on "green cars" (Ie. overpriced cars that nobody wants).

Toyota and the other foreign manufacturers were careful never to become too dependent on unions and they are also not subject to the two fleet requirements (too much, they are careful to skirt them) of the CAFE regulations thus giving them a credible bargaining chip against unions like the UAW when negotiations are necessary. For more info, see http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122584326266699163.html
That's the JumpBox (http://www.jumpbox.com/) people are doing.
"Society agrees that "programmer" is a word for assembly-line workers with no demonstrated creative powers, just as "hacker" is a word for 13-year-old script kiddies with criminal intent. Which is why many programmers are smart enough to come up with a new job title and/or a broader skill set after a few years on the job."

So, maybe a more productive discussion than "what should i do for a career instead of programming?" would be "how can i get a more respectable job title?"
If you're worried about your job being endangered by entry level graduates(1) or outsourcing you should then equip yourself with skills that an entry level graduate or an outsourcing shop won't have. That means you should strive to do something beyond just byte shuffling: as someone else pointed out in another story, acquire some background knowledge - be it in physics or electrical engineering, physics, mathematics or even psychology or philosophy.

Or acquire deep domain specific expertise: in security, in distributed systems or in networks, in data mining/ extraction or even in systems administration (you'd be surprised how hard it is to find excellent coders who are also good sysadmins and/or excellent sysadmins who are also good coders and how many jobs demand both).

My mother is in her sixties, isn't a native English speaker and programs in C (which some may look upon as "outdated" compared to C++ and Java), Scheme and OCaml (which aren't mainstream languages). However, she's got a very strong background in mathematics and domain specific knowledge in hardware design automation.

If you're starting out, learning the latest APIs/buzzword right now may be worse for your career later even if it brings higher pay now -- it would be a case of premature optimization.

(1) One exception is that I've heard (from a manager at IBM) is big companies (e.g. IBM) prefer to only hire for entry-level positions and then open up the more senior positions only to internal hires (the idea being is that entry-level employees grow while being trained on internal tools/methodologies/best practices and as they advance, have a track record that can easily be examined); but with the industry shifting more and more to innovation occurring in start-ups and SMEs that shouldn't be much of a burden.
Rapid calculating has about as much to do with real mathematics as double-entry accounting has to the Tao, so I'm at a bit of a loss as to what this fuss is really all about.
Sending out G1s to all employees worldwide is still a great gesture IMO. Forget the $1k or $15k, a gift is a gift.

Now imagine the amount of recommendations, improvements, suggestions that these top brains will be making for the G1. That's gona be interesting.
Just anecdotal, but I had a Thinkpad 600 which lasted from 1998 till 2006. While all machines will fail eventually, it is nice to find the ones which last 8 years instead of 2. Similar to the decision making process for cars: getting one that lasts till 250k miles is generally preferred to one that'll last 50k miles. It would be nice to have a reliability database for laptops similar to that available for cars (http://autos.msn.com/home/reliability_ratings.aspx).
People do regularly choose not to immigrate to a richer country because of similar reasons.
I'm pretty sure it was a parody.
Feelings are reality for most people. If this were not true, religion, depression, stock market crashes and mental illness would not exist and we'd be living in a utopia.
iTunes doesn't belong to the music companies. They're 'trading analog dollars for digital pennies' & they don't even have control over distribution.

It took iTunes 5 years to serve 3 billion songs. Towards the end, Napster hit 2.79 billion songs in one month. There's little goodwill with textbooks, so the piracy rates might be a little north of the default 90%. If I were them, I'd avoid ebooks like the plague.
And clothing: http://www.cafepress.com/rubystuff.232041369

:)
The Return of the Old Grouch (a tale of customer service gone wrong)
successfully relocate to atlanta for my job and try to hit the startup scene there.

improve my fitness, which has been going downhill a bit in the last month or so due to injuries and holidays.

launch a project and get it to profitability.