skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
HN had a posting about "postmodern programming" a couple of days back, so I thought I would give it a try. Google found at least 10 pages of documents, Yahoo a bunch, even answers.com found a couple. Cuil? Zip, Nada, zero. I guess I won't switch.

EDIT: My bad. Apologies to Cuil and HN. I had a typo in my query. Cuil didn't catch it, but Google suggested the correct spelling when I gave it the typo.
Sometimes you need (), sometimes you don't. Some people
think the lack of "unnecessary" parenthesis makes the
language more elegant, I just say it makes it harder to
determine if something is an attribute or a method, for
example.

Well, this is because Ruby, like Objective-C, is a strict OOP language, and there's no such thing as an "attribute" (all instance variables are private). When something looks like an attribute, it's a reader method that returns the attribute.
The article lacks any real point--the only solid point he's making is, "if you write software and charge money for it, your software will be pirated."

He then implies some software "deserves" to be pirated, by claiming World of Goo falls outside that category (because it isn't from the "bowels" of a "faceless EA-Activision franchise sweatshop").

Many independent game developers don't view piracy as black and white. I would be interested in reading an article where someone makes a hypothesis one way or the other, and backs it up. This article isn't that.

And, for the record, the amended World of Goo piracy rate is 82%. 2D Boy mentions that in an update on the very same blog post Jeff links to, but I guess that would mean he would've had to read beyond the title to notice: http://2dboy.com/2008/11/13/90/
> undoubtedly there’s a genetic disposition for women to be more risk averse

There are some reasons to think that. But they are not beyond doubt. There are smart, educated people who disagree, and even if there weren't, one of the important things about science is keeping the ideas open to doubt.
Call me unambitious if you like but I would be happy to fail as Cuil has "failed". They still receive over 150K uniques per month. I would gladly take half of that.

Thanks to the massive mainstream publicity they received around launch time as being a "Google Killer" they were able to expose their site to millions (yes, millions) and lock in an audience.

Sure, the numbers have dropped off since then. So what?

I'm tired of hearing the word "fail" bandied about so self-righteously as if Cuil should be ashamed of not beating Google at their own game. Like that's some kind of minor challenge. Yes, their implementation is lacking. Yes they have not taken advantage of the time since launch to work out its weaknesses. But their PR department certainly can't be accused of failure and I wouldn't be surprised if they're making some decent ad revenue off that kind of traffic.

It would be more fair - to them and to us - to call them a mixed success. One of the problems of the word 'fail' used so liberally in these contexts is that it is a blanket refusal to look at the balance of someone's achievements in its context. Used this way, it's actually a bigoted term and has the very problematic side-effect of making us less willing to take a balanced perspective on our own achievements in addition to those of the people we label with it.
Fine, I hope all the people who feel this way leave. Go. Get the fuck out.

I believe in American exceptionalism. I believe that there's something about the immigrant experience that allows people to pull themselves up and live their dreams with lots of hard work. Yes, it takes luck - but so does everything else worth having, including love and health. You can become rich and fabulous and no one will fault you for your accent or your class.

So take my taxes - I'm happy to have a profit enough to pay them. I'm safe in my country's borders, I have 500 channels of TV available to me, I can eat meat every day for every meal if I wanted to, and I get to watch my two favorite teams play baseball day and night during the season.

My father chose to move here for me, before I was even born. Not that India is some kind of hellhole - far from it - but, today, on what would have been his 60th birthday were he alive, I know what gift he gave me.
Umm I just tried that : http://www.cuil.com/search?q=%22postmodern+programming%22

It returned 516 results for me (when including quotes in query).
No kidding with your first point, I still can't get over this thing I saw back in October:

Transport Secretary Geoff Hoon has said the government is prepared to go "quite a long way" with civil liberties to "stop terrorists killing people".

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7674775.stm
That is the fun thing about Iceland and its people; everyone has 2-3 wildly disparate jobs, and they're just as good at all of them. No-one in Iceland thinks it's odd that a musician should also be a VC.

Tho' they have deep, deep structural problems with their economy; compared to the Icelanders the British were sensible with credit. I'd wish them luck sorting it out but they don't need it, they'll have their act together long before we do.
Getting a 503...anyone got a copy to mirror somewhere?
Live.com can hardly get any traffic and their search works. I had high hopes for Cuil but gave up when it became clear that their search results were simply bad or missing. They should have held a closed beta for 6 months.
If you're in the East Bay, there's Berkeley Coworking (http://www.berkeleycoworking.com/) near the Ashby BART station. It's not all techies, and not open all the time, but it's a damn good place to get some work done.
KPSS TERCiH REHBERi - KPSS 2008 2009 KPSS TERCiHLERi BAŞVURULARI SINAV TARiHi SORULARI
Hmm... This guy clearly hasn't seen any functional languages (he thinks that patterns are his invention).

Not that interesting.
Verizon Awarded $33 Million In Cybersquatter Case
Without them too.
KOEI series

it led me to edit the save files and change the hex value (i think i used norton commander) for abilities & resources

i did the same with civ1, had 65535 gold at 4000bc, stuffs like that are now easily changed with cheat codes / editor

not really programming, i know, but that started my interest
try duckduckgo
I haven't been to noisebridge (yet), but from the people I've talked to at relatively large events like SuperHappyDevHouse, there's a quite a few smaller, informal groups of hackers getting together to work on stuff. It's just that most of these occur in peoples' apartments, so they're not open to the public. If you're interested in finding some place like this, though, I recommend you try and meet people somewhere like SHDH.
Are you by any chance an INTP? What you describe is a strong indicator for that personality type.

http://www.intp.org/intprofile.html

"The drive to understand things that are not yet understood is a very powerful force in the life of an INTP. Where the Ti preference is strong, this drive can override the experiential element so strongly that the INTP will become quickly bored with anything that he has successfully analysed to the point of understanding it. Once understood, it has nothing left to offer, once the satisfaction which comes with achieving the goal of understanding diminishes."
Great post! Thank you sachinag.

When things get tough and my motivation ebbs, I think of my 2 grandfathers. As teenagers, they left everything and everyone they ever knew with no assurance of ever seeing them again to come here. Why? So that I could have a better life. I have to get back to work; I simply can't let them down.
Wait until the end of the series. He says in the comments that these posts are supposed to bring a larger point.

Kind of off-topic, but it is funny how these posts remind me of History class in high-school. I had an amazing teacher: she would say that most of the topics would individually seem dull (things like Middle Ages, Renaissance, French Revolution, Russian Revolution, World War I and II), the whole thing would be a whole more interesting in the end, where we could make sense of the why of the succession of historical events. And she was absolutely right. When we got a chance to look at all of the pieces, I was able to think of History as a running system.

Getting back to the point: I'd say that individually both posts seem pretty inane. Even the first one was imho too silly. I do expect, however, that in the end Yegge will manage to make sense of it all.
To our vantage point, the universe was "undefined" before the big bang. It's also "undefined" from our vantage point to every space that exists (or rather doesn't exist) outside of our universe.

If you buy certain flavors of string theory, you could say that we can only tell what's going on beyond our own 'brane, as our 'brane happens to be an embedded system that we would need to step outside to understand what exists outside of it.

Essentially it seems to me that Yegge is saying that we don't know what's going on outside of our 3-space 1-time universe, and that even posing the questions from within the universe is an exercise in futility.
But is it OK for someone to benefit from something they aren't willing to pay for? What is the difference between someone who decides to go without because they don't or can't pay and someone who says I can't/won't pay so I'll just copy it from someone else? Is it morals or economics?
You cannot really use morals in an example where you aren't depriving anyone of anything.
someone's gotta do it...the guy who started the original has decided not to do it this time around:

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/12/27/fucked-companyadbrite-f...
What you're saying makes perfect sense, but that isn't what Yegge is saying at all. You're saying the state of the universe may or may not be sensible before the Big Bang, but it's unknowable so speculation is pointless. What Yegge is saying is that it's like an undefined variable: the state is totally arbitrary. But we don't even know if the universe could be anything before the Big Bang.
Yes, the system makes it very easy to do something that should be hard (patent trolling), and very hard to do something that should be easy (invalidating bad patents).
What is behind the name duckduckgo
No seriously is it because most of the good domains are in the hands of cyber-squatters
Yes, I am, actually. Not sure if I'd noticed that I fit that trait of INTPs so well, though. :)
Medical and health insurance costs over 7% of income are deductible. Could be different this year, I haven't checked. If you have a business, it can be all deductible.
But the pirating is minimal compared to user base.
The people who choose not to copy the game without paying are depriving themselves of the benefit of the game even though they don't have to vs. the people who decide its ok to play the game even though they can't or won't pay. So what is the difference between the two people? The economics is factored out (neither person pays) so the difference would seem to be one of personal morals.
I sometimes think that half the problem with employer-provided health care is that people have stopped thinking of it as insurance, as you describe. Instead, you get people who think that they have some sort of right to pay $10 and get $100 of treatment in return, every year, for perpetuity.

The vision plan at my recent open enrollment demonstrated this clearly. You pay $X, and everyone's sitting there determining if they get $X+ back from the plan. And in this case, the vision plan isn't even insurance, because basically the only people going on it have a 100% chance of paying out. And it turns out that if you work the math, for one person, or one person + spouse/SO, you pay in $X and the max payout is $X-, precisely because the probability of payout is so very close to 100%. (This is because the plan only covers glasses and routine eye exams; catastrophic eye damage is covered by normal health insurance.)

(I further note that vision coverage has been one of the most free market of medical endeavors, precisely because of this math.)

How do we know the system is distorted? Because almost nobody actually realizes that this is an insurance system, that you should be expected to pay routine costs out-of-pocket, and that the system is physically incapable of giving everybody in the pool more than they pay in. Unfortunately, this attitude is so ingrained that every government plan I've ever seen also reifies this mindset too, and I think any plan that is conceptualized that way will fail because from the very beginning, you've built it on a shoddy foundation.

We have got to pry insurance away from the employers. (Once again, I note that we've managed to export this problem to the rest of the world. Similarly, I often think that the US would be really screwed by our crappy school system, except that we managed to export it to the entire rest of the world first, so nobody actually has a good system, just slightly different iterations of the same crappy model. "Fortunately" for the US!)
Advertising Done Right - Some really great commercials
I've had the Fit for over a year now and I worship it. It's as if Honda put the smartest engineers on some of the more 'mundane' things you find in a car. For example, the back seat design is brilliant. They fold all the way down for an entire flat space in the back, or flip up for putting in tall objects, like a bicycle.
Expected this to be entertaining or informative. Instead it's just a shameless plug for the site and its founder. Lame, duck.
"They all seem to be extremely (in some cases obsessively) curious about why they, in particular, have been successful. It seems almost as though they feel undeserving, as if the rest of their lives have been an attempt to prove their first success had a reason or formula."

You find the same thing if you talk to successful people in any field, once they get to talking shop. E.g. a successful playwright will be very curious about what drove his first big success. Not (necessarily) because he feels unworthy, but because he wants to write more successful plays.

The curiosity of the successful about success at whatever they've been working on is practically universal. It's partly cause and partly effect.
The page is broken: "Service Temporarily Unavailable". I guess that's why you shouldn't host your pages on GeoCities.
I believe there's something about the immigrant experience too, but we don't let immigrants in anymore (I'm being a bit sensationalist but even if you include all of the tacitly allowed illegal immigration we are accepting four or five times less immigrants than we did before the 1920 act) I'm not at home but it's something like 15% pre and 3% post.

And to be really controversial I think we are perilously close to creating ethnic Americans and I don't think that's what we should want.
but tell me why failure rate still so high?
> Sure, the numbers have dropped off since then. So what?

I'm guessing the problem has something to do with the 33 million in VC they took.

> It would be more fair - to them and to us - to call them a mixed success

Perhaps you could if they don't take any money but they did, and now they have to figure out how to get that 5-10 times return on the 33 million they took.

That's the reason people consider Cuil to be a failure.
In other words, the chase is more fun than the kill. Yep that's me, although I see that kind of activity all around me - I'm not sure if I want to 'understand' something so much as experience it, and to that extent I think my ability to get bored has been facilitated by a culture which values the novel and the new. But this makes sense in high economic growth societies - your consumers need short attention spans if you want to keep selling them stuff.
There's no secret to filing an efficient tax return. All it takes is one good accountant.
Quote:

In fact, the most effective anti-piracy software development strategy is the simplest one of all:

1. Have a great freaking product.
2. Charge a fair price for it.

Is he joking? The World of Goo is a great freaking product. And The World of Goo is fairly priced at $20. And yet the piracy rate is still at 82% or so. So where does Jeff base his "in fact" anti-piracy claim on?
Wrong. If you have a preexisting condition, you can't get individual insurance. If you have more than two prescriptions, you can't get insurance. I can afford it, but I can't get it. Even if you have COBRA, the premium goes up by 50% in 18 months and runs out completely in 36.
Another phenomena that raises the costs is the haphazard and/or non-existent approach to capping the value of awards in malpractice suits. It's a secondary manifestation of the separation between the people choosing the price and the people footing the bill.
Does anyone comment to that degree?

My general policy is to follow the "Use meaningful names" policy and use that as the commenting. The meaningful names of the function give you an idea of what they do and what side effects they have. The meaningful names of the parameters tell you what they do.

Maybe it's not a perfect system, but I think it's a happy medium between eating up a lot of time commenting and having totally unreadable code
How chromosomes meet in the dark - Switch that turns on X chromosome matchmaking
I would agree with your opinion if a vast majority of people who have computers and Internet connections could not afford another $20. But what if there was no pirated version of this game available? I think you'd find that, if it's not too inconvenient, more people would actually buy the game.

For example, console games don't suffer as much from pirating, but what if hypothetically it was as easy to pirate a game for your Wii or 360 as it was for your PC? I very much doubt that people would continue to buy the games.

So basically, the very presence of pirated games available for free is taking sales away from the game makers, people are simply choosing the free option.
Right now, a lot of car companies are getting reamed by the economy (obviously), stemming a lot from doling out leases and then seeing the values of the cars tanking with the economy, causing them to take large losses. As a result, it is difficult at some companies to get approved with favorable interest rates, whether you're buying or leasing, especially with the Big 3.

I'd start with seeing what kind of car you're compatible with by taking a look at http://www.carzen.com.

I recently bought a Volkswagen Jetta Wolfsburg Edition (same 2.0 turbocharged engine as the GTI and GLI but about $2500 less). Volkswagens retain their resale value (right up there with Mini), so they didn't lose much and are taking advantage of that by giving very favorable rates. Trust me, you can get a more expensive VW for less than other cars, just from the dramatic difference in interest rates. And their service is amazingly better than most other dealerships as well. Two of my roommates have since also gotten VW's.

I'm definitely a car person and autocross regularly. I've taken my Jetta to a track day at a race track we have nearby, and I'm completely satisfied with this thing.
I was a member of the first coworking space in San Francisco for a few weeks toward the end --- the one at Spiral Muse. I've also been to the (now defunct) hacklab here in Buenos Aires, to SuperHappyDevHouse (which is sort of an intermittent hacker space), to TechShop, to some classes at the Crucible, and gone to Wiki Wednesday at Citizen Space, and I'm considering signing up as a client of CoworkCentral here. So, given this broad but shallow experience, I think coworking spaces don't have much in common with hacker spaces; coworking spaces (IME) are a place where people go primarily to work (and aren't necessarily hackers, nor are they necessarily going to be happy with you interrupting their work to ask for help with your own), while hacker spaces are where they go to spend time with other hackers and work on fun stuff that you aren't getting paid for, in a fun collaborative setting. You might meet cofounders of a company at a hacker space and then go start your company in a coworking facility.

I recognize that my experience on both sides is pretty shallow, though.

noahlt writes: "Except maybe that coworking facilities already exist and work."

I'm pretty sure hacker spaces have been around a few more years than coworking spaces.
You mean 'GND's Not DOS' :)
The Myth of the Open Source Business Model
What do you think about TechShop?
"But is it OK for someone to benefit from something they aren't willing to pay for? "

It happens all the time. For example, I benefited from your comment, but I wouldn't have paid to read it.
I agree the curiosity of the successful about success is fairly universal, perhaps however there is more of an 'introspection' industry due to the democratisation of success - in other words, more people want to know why/how you were successful, and this in-turn can create a vicious cycle in which the creator/artist/achiever spends too much effort on the act of recreating something achieved before, and in turn producing a parody of their former work (I see Joseph Heller's post Catch-22 work as an example of this).
The issue of 'writers block' wasn't so pressing in early modern society - Shakespeare had to write more successful plays to make a living, to that extent I think playwrights envisioned their careers as the art of learning a craft: Shakespeare could not be considered a creative 'genius' until a long time after, once the concept of an individual genius had taken root.
Yeah, I got into programming through the tuts from Denthor of Asphyxia. I really found demos to be cool and wanted to do something similar :-)...
Because the method is explained, but not the exact path. There is a process to follow to help you make something people want, but no way of knowing what people want without trying.
Ack. What I'm looking for in London is really a late-hours coffee shop with a bit of a community. Hackers optional. Any suggestions?
If piracy rates haven't changed in 32 years and are still at 90% doesn't that mean piracy doesn't hurt technology?

Developers have a perverted view, they think 90% of people are stealing their product. When really 90% of people wouldn't pay to use your product to begin with.

This is when DRM comes in and the developer tries to force this 90% to pay. However, people either hack the DRM or simply don't use the product. I imagine Linux got a lot more users when Microsoft started implementing DRM and some people didn't want to fight with it.

Adobe and Microsoft prices are ridiculous, why? Because they make money off the 10%, not off hunting the 90%. Microsoft doesn't even actively target pirates, it doesn't check every time you go to send an error report, it doesn't check every time you log in. Why? Because the 90% of people are an amazing resource to hunt down problems that will make the 10% pay even more, specifically big business.
One of the things that nearly everyone here is missing is that insurance plans cap costs. Hospital costs for an uninsured person are 2 to 4 times that which an insurance company will pay. I had a heart attack. The hospital billed $80,000, but the insurance company paid only $18,000, and I paid $2,000. Same for dental plans. They cap the amount that provider can charge and stipulate that he can't bill you for the excess.

The idea that you can negotiate as an individual with health care providers is silly. When I had my heart attack, I was in no position to call half-a-dozen hospitals to get the best price. Try going to your pharmacy to get the price of a prescription knocked down. Individuals have very little negotiating power against corporations. If you doubt that, take a look at the history of the labor movement.

That said, if you are low income and need expensive meds, many pharmaceutical companies have plans for certain drugs. Costco gives a small discount for people with no insurance.
I think you must be confusing me with someone else or something. I do some consulting through ClearLogic consulting which is a very small consulting company, but I was actually referring to Spark::red, a company I founded with a couple of other guys. It's a niche managed hosting provider and is definitely my "own shop" :)