skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I get memory leaks even with nightly garbage collection, or maybe I have bugs that collect the good stuff and leave the garbage.
Good hacker essays?
I'll be honest and say that this is for a college assignment. I need to choose an essay from which I can then study to understand more fully and finally come up with my own idea. Honestly, I am a little tired of most of the essays in our anthology so I'd like to use something that fit my experiences more.

It's hard to describe, but I'm looking for essays of the hacker-spirit, it doesn't have to be related to computers or tech. It just needs to come from that mindset.

The more general it is the better, so I'd prefer something about the values of openness and Free to one about the openness of Linux or something like that. I know PG has a large collection, but some pointers would still be nice. Also, good essays that you think hackers tend to like in general are also welcome, even if they're not "hacker-esque".

My apologies if it looks like I'm making HN do my homework. Please look at it more as me trying to find literature that is more representive of me. I will use others as possible choices, so please don't think I'm trapping myself into writing about hackers.
I'd agree with the comment "it depends", except that I've always considered myself a generalist, and it seems to be the main reason I've managed to avoid employment problems over the last several employment "bubbles".
that sounds like that show "the office" gone wrong. i'd hang myself
I think if we're talking consulting, that's to say, a la carte development, yes, there's a premium on specialists, presuming the person doing the ordering knows what they're looking for.

There are domains where a lot of specialist knowledge transfers over. A kernel hacker and jump into glibc with little pain. Someone developing databases can jump into real-time systems and get up to speed pretty quickly. In those sorts of fields, if you've not cut your teeth on something pretty closely related, you're basically not worth paying for.

Turning that around to the web world, if you only know Ruby on Rails, but can't do Javascript, don't know your way around an image editor and don't know a little SQL, you're less valuable. Somebody who's competent in several of those has a lot higher value.

A year and a half ago I basically wrote C++. That's it. Today, since I also do our web programming, I regularly use three or four programming languages per week. But looking down the line, it's not an especially good use of my time to have me, a systems programmer, futzing around with jQuery.
Yeah please lets not go back to webrings, banner exchanges etc
Good point. And if you get your coding experience in an extended fun project, outside job, or heavy OSS, you are far ahead of those pure CSers who did nothing but class assignments.
You, my friend, have completely missed the point.

Any given idea in sci-fi (are they going to make us refer to it as syfy now?) may or may not be particularly useful in and of itself. Most ideas is sci-fi are completely impractical anyway, so why fret about it?

Art / literature / music / what have you are not resources that can be mined. You can't freebase Heinlein (though I like the thought) or take a bump of Ernst.

Follow your interests, experience works as a whole, and don't expect to be changed.

I would argue that the difference between sci-fi and pop business is that few people truly enjoy business books (not to mention the fact that most business books have a shelf-life of 12 minutes.)

They read them because they believe that they will put them on the path to, well, I don't know what. True there's wisdom to be had out there, but, you usually can't buy it for $19.99+S/H, regardless of genre.

You can read "Time Enough For Love" or just the "Notebooks of Lazarus Long."

You can drink wine with your friends or dash your brains out with 190-proof Everclear.

The value is in the experience, not the proof.

1) Live life.

2) Don't be a douche.

3) Stop thinking about money.

4) Be genuinely interested in what you do.

5) Profit.
The cost (financially and ethically) of policing those things is not worth the cost of accepting them. I am not advocating a police state where every transaction is monitored. Instead, I am promoting individual freedom--the freedom for people to spend their money on only their own religion (if any).

You keep using the word "distasteful" as though this is an issue of style instead of substance. It isn't; freedom of religion and the separation of church and state fundamental to our democracy.
Not only is it not responsible to maintain a 4% reserve ratio, in the US it's illegal, and has been for decades. (The legal requirement is 10%.) That also means that it pretty much doesn't happen; banks are pretty tightly regulated. Until the repeal of Glass-Steagall, if I understand correctly, it was also illegal for your banker to invest your money in stocks, penny or otherwise.

The extent to which banks are conduits for lending to the government is independent of FDIC insurance. FDIC insurance is pretty much normal insurance, in that it is funded by premiums charged to policyholders, rather than, say, tax money. Banks are conduits for lending to the government in the sense that they maintain much of their reserves in US Treasury bonds.

Your comment gives the appearance of someone commenting vehemently on a topic about which they know very little. I mean, it's hard for me to remember that there are people in the world who know even less about banking than I do, but it sounds like you're a member of that elite group.
Dubai is a city built on the backs of maltreated migrant workers. There is little glamour for these mainly South East Asian workers who earn $1 a day. The difference in lifestyles between the labor camps these workers live in (people literally living out of massive shipping containers) and the fast cars, over-sized houses that expats own couldn’t be any greater. The companies that bring the migrant workers over have been accused of purposely forcing them to stay in the UAE by misplacing their passports and delaying salary payments. The UAE has also had its human rights record heavily criticized by the UN and human rights organizations. So despite lavish expat lifestyles and impressive urban growth, there are plenty of non-economic reasons why Dubai is an example of how not to build a city.
...which was a favorite among the management...
Agile Estimating
First you say, "linear models describe most of the variance with the fewest number of free parameters," and then later you say, "In other words ... the variance that a higher order model would describe would be less, perhaps much less, than the portion the linear part describes."

In my limited statistical experience, the problem with higher-order models is not that you get less bang, but that you need more buck: that is, there are too many free parameters. But in your second quote, you seem to be talking about higher-order models that have as few parameters as a linear model, i.e. one parameter, plus one per independent variable. What kind of higher-order models are you thinking of?
Yeah, I mean games are so technically uninteresting. They also involve no programming skill, compared to serving web pages.
The ad-hominem fallacy fallacy:
http://plover.net/~bonds/adhominem.html

A critique is not ad-hominem if the target is a character trait relevant to the speaker's point.
What would you want the content to look like? Sites like <a href="http://kvraudio.com">KVR</a>; do a good job of covering the world of software synthesizers, modular synthesis and production techniques, albeit in a very different format
Revisiting thoughts about Paul's old article re: starting a startup in a downturn
http://www.bobgod.com/lazaruslong.html

"Yield to temptation; it may not pass your way again."
Why every boggling blog writer nowadays says "application" while meaning "web site" ?
You didn't answer my question, though. It would seem that in theory you would oppose (or find offensive) the bake sale example, even if you didn't advocate enforcement.

The question is, if I pay taxes and someone gets a school voucher or tax rebate, have they violated my freedom of religion by spending it at a Church? That seems to be the essence of your argument and I want to be sure I am clear on it.

Please also note the US constitution: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof...".

So you would have to argue that by giving the recipient of the school voucher or tax rebate freedom to spend it at a church, congress has attempted to establish a state religion or prevent free exercise thereof.
It's not hard to find a couple hundred private boats and put 1-2 cruise missiles on each of them.

I imagine that it's extremely difficult to do this undetected, which is why we have intel services.
"I think there's a real danger, no doubt. But the end of carriers? All carriers are rotting scrap heaps? Please. That's a lot of yelling and attention-seeking blogging, not serious analysis."

I wholeheartedly agree. In my most humble opinion, an emerging fad is to announce the collapse of all things American. This meme has been gaining momentum for years. Now we hear stories like:

- the U.S. dollar will soon be worthless and the American economy will collapse.

- the U.S. will disintegrate into a bunch of smaller countries.

- all American technical jobs will move overseas, mainly to India and (guess what?) China!

- the U.S. Military is at its most vulnerable point in History.

I will believe in doomsday scenarios when I have the numbers to analyze. Like John McCarthy once said: "He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense."
I agree. I’d like to see what people we are specifically talking about here. I think there’s a fallacy out there that having a high level degree means you’re an educated person but in my experience that often isn’t the case. A lot of people who have MBAs retained very little of the actual curriculum in school.

This is why companies tend to cut middle managers in a downturn. Because they are essentially unskilled skilled workers in that they got an education but failed to retain the skill. The examples given in the article (a manager at a marketing firm and an editorial assistant) seem to fall in that category.
Well, no, they still need "cause" and a court order, it just may not be "just cause" in your opinion.
our icons of today are our counter-examples of tomorrow.

Moreover I think the list of counter-examples bout cities is full, thank you everybody: Brasilia, Valparaiso, Paris, New York, Tokyo, etc., now Dubai.
Maybe now is time to resurrect Christopher Alexander's spirit (I just checked, he is medically alive) and look at what is good and why it's good.
Or how about this little gem about Scribd:

"That's like a drunk driver protesting innocence because he's covered by the best insurance company."

Wait, what? If a pirate is a drunk driver, then Scribd is a car manufacturer. Does it make sense to sue Ford for drunk driving incidents in their vehicles?
I didn't realize that anecdotes proved things. You should pay closer attention to the things you say.
Negative if you factor in the cost to exercise them (typically you will have to when you leave). The author does only recommend exercising the options if the company is profitable, this is probably good advice. If the company is not self-sufficient consider the potential impact of a future financing with the present market. Here are two to factor in to your calculation:

- Reallocation of ownership between share classes (substantially diluting the existing common stock).

- Creation of new shares with a high senior liquidation preference.

You might see the reallocation of the pre-money value happen on a "money-in" basis. The valuation itself will obviously depend on how much the company needs the money. When it's all done the existing common stock (founders and employees) could well be worth less than 1% of the company. If you're still at the company you'll probably get new options issued but if you've left you'll just have the old ones worth approximately $0.00.

That said I would focus on whether you're having fun and doing/learning something you think is worthwhile rather than on how much your options might be worth.
Read a takedown of the egregious reporting in this story: http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2009/04/an-open-letter-to-patr...
Thanks for the insightful input Justin. Come say hello when you get here. As for interwebs, @tylerwillis said the capacity is now doubled so it shouldn't be a problem, but I'll be there in 20 to test.
Java is the 21st century COBOL, a must have for all offshore developers. Stay away from it. Learn Python/Ruby and Django or Rails. They will keep you way ahead on the productivity curve. If you are doing web development, learn the full stack, html and js all the way through to SQL. If not the web, find something interesting and dig deep into it. Think about what is not out there. Don't do social networking or mobile games, they are too crowded. Enterprise solutions, however, have barely been tapped.

The biggest skill is networking and not just with HN types. A socially active SO who collects people is a wonderful person to have, better than a VC. Who you know is better than what you know.
Revisionism, in this case, is an entirely appropriate word. It may not be a documented fact that certain policies caused a given outcome, but the fact that a given outcome occurred is just that: a fact. Denying the facts, or misstating them, is revisionism of the worst sort, and that is what was going on. See my other post in this thread for a link to further information.
Do you mean that smart people need less sleep to be able to perform a particular task, or that smart people need less sleep to perform at their own peak?

The above analogy leads more naturally to the first conclusion. Give a smart person a cognitive task to perform, and gradually deprive him of sleep; eventually, his performance will be reduced to the level of the average person.

It's less clear how the second conclusion would hold -- that smart people are incrementally affected less by sleep loss than average people. In other words, a priori, I don't think there's much reason to believe that a smart person would be impaired less by losing an hour of sleep than an average person would.
Why on earth are you linking to encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com instead of wikipedia.com? By doing so you give people following your link staler content, a bunch of ads, worse formatting, and no ability to fix errors they find.

(For those who don't know: e.t.c is one of many sites that just scrape the entirety of Wikipedia -- er, I think they omit some bits, mostly in the hope of making the true origin of the material less obvious -- and re-present its content as if it's theirs, adding a bunch of paid advertisements, with just a bit of teeny-tiny small print crediting Wikipedia. This doesn't seem to me like behaviour we should be encouraging.
I think you're missing the point. You can't bash Ruby because you wrote shitty code in Ruby. What do you want to bet I can write a shitty message queue in Scala? Does that mean Scala is bad? "Reliable, high performance, correct and maintainable" have nothing to do with the language you've chosen.
So long we we're saying, "Look, no I am not talking about..."

My point is that VMs that have been around for decades capable of supporting languages of equivalent power, and that these are some silly multiplier faster than Ruby 1.8. This is going to be something like halfway to two orders of magnitude for some silly benchmarks, and much less in real life. Really, there's not much of a problem in practice, especially with the embarrassing wealth we have lying around in terms of processing power.

The real problem -- the thing I am making a point about -- is people going around saying that, "Oh well, you have to give something up to get the power..."

No. You. Do. Not!

Ruby is not that advanced. Yes, I would say that it's a lovely language. It has everything I want, but it's not doing anything that hasn't been done before. It's unique in that it combines lots of elements in a way that's really dandy, but there's nothing magic about it. There's certainly nothing so esoteric, that it couldn't be made to run fast. (There are a few things that were just bad design decisions, like making every Object behave like a little hashtable, which could've been left out and made it much easier to run faster without losing power and expressiveness.)

Oh, and people did implement OSes in Smalltalk and Lisp way back when. Also, ever hear about something called Singularity? That's a recent OS built on top of a VM. In fact, I think that more people should be doing just that -- building OSes that are "turtles all the way down" and built to not only support a particular VM, but to have every single atom of it available to tweaking by a high-level language. (Lua would be great for this.) But this is a digression.

Again, going back to my original point -- the real ludicrous thing is that the programmer community as a whole is still in the thrall of expectations about speed vs. programming language power that date from the 70s. And anyone who thinks you have to give up as much speed as Ruby has to get that power is very much in the thrall of such an idea.
Ability to learn, listen, and imagine.
Say that the intel services say that every small craft is having missiles loaded onto it. What do you do then? Shoot every boat on sight, civilian or military, on the theory that it might have a cruise missile on board?

Many of these boats don't even show up on radar. They're not a big enough target for you to hit with missiles. Even if you could, the missile costs more than the boat. So you'd need to dispatch a destroyer or a bunch of aircraft to strafe it with gunfire.

But then you leave your destroyers/aircraft open to counterattack from small boats. At $30k a boat and $500k a cruise missile, how many of them do you have to sink to equal a $100M aircraft or a $1B destroyer?

Incidentally, Japan had a similar plan for defense of the home islands in WW2. They produced nearly 6000 Shinyo, suicide motorboats with a crew of one and a massive explosive in the bow. As the American invasion fleet entered home waters, the plan was for these to swarm the fleet and blow up as many vessels as possible. I suspect this is a major reason why we dropped the A-bomb instead of going forward with an invasion of the Japanese home islands.
For sure, anything that encourages your best programmers to leave is Really Bad. My interpretation of the quoted sentences isn't "Having my best people leave is the best problem I could have" but "Having people good enough that I can't make a meaningful performance scale that they aren't at the top of is the best problem I could have". Which isn't obviously wrong, though presumably it's not because of implementing Spolsky's scheme that he had such good people.
The Dispossessed (same author/universe) always gets my juices flowing when I start considering developing software for managing vastly complex systems (i.e. society). I especially enjoy how she confronts the issues, blatant and subtle, which would arise from such systems.
Done: http://www.listable.org/show/url-shortening-sites

Thanks!
Also, as Alex himself alluded in his original piece, why would someone who presumably has a stake in a company that shrugs off half-billion dollar acquisition offers be trying anything devious to promote a technical book?
Obie took the easy way and simply said 'oh it must be the crappy Twitter code'.

Too bad he is ignoring the very valid points about Ruby's slow runtime, memory usage because you are forced to a per-process mode, lack of proper threading and usage of dynamic languages in large systems.
The idea is that you store anti-ship missiles on civilian craft, then swarm a carrier group and launch a sneak attack from tiny speed boats and fishing vessels. Air supremacy does not solve that, and there is currently no defense against such a swarm.

Everyone thought battleships were invincible until they turned out to be exactly USELESS with the advent of good carrier-based airplanes. Its quite possible that the anti-ship missile, in large deployments in a post-war declaration period, has done this to the carrier.

Even though the Japanese were smart enough to launch the attack on Pearl harbor, the US and Japanese navies were both certain their battleships would be important in the upcoming conflict, and the Japanese navy trained intensely for large scale night-battles among fleets of battleships. Everyone woke up overnight to the fact that battleships were exactly useless, and it was a rude awakening.
There was a proposal to build lots of fast, highly maneuverable catamaran vessels using stealth technology and armed with cruise missiles. If I was China, I'd be building a few squadrons of those things. (You could even have them leave the missile behind in the water, to pop up and launch itself towards the group at a predetermined time, making it much harder to find the launch platform.)
That missile is for Aegis class destroyers and cruisers. I have yet to hear of the defense system on an aircraft carrier. So you need to have a destroyer paired up with an AC.

Now while the Aegis system is truly kickass, it has yet to be used in wartime, excluding shooting down an Iranian civilian aircraft (oops!).

The air superiority that aircraft carriers provide is pretty cool too. But go back and read the War Nerd's posts and he goes through how a how defensless AC's really are from non-traditional adversaries.
I don't believe Engine Yard has hitched it's wagon. Quite the opposite considering they fund a great deal of work on the Rubinius ruby implementation effort.

Generalizations like "ruby falls down at high throughput" are fun to echo but a poor basis for planning architecture. The constraints of the tools you're using matters, but so does the overall pattern of how you're applying them.

Efficiency is a property of languages. Stability and Scalability are properties of architectures. Design is the process of fitting one to the other, and requires real actual thought, work and measurement, not just repeating chestnuts.
You forgot one of the major parties to the organization--the shareholders, who are, as far as I understand economics, incapable for some reason of being "ideologically driven." The shareholders pushed for China. I'm not sure Google could have said no.
I have to say that it does. Consider the carrier group nearest Iran. If the theory is true, all Iran needs is a fleet of civilian boats equipped with anti-ship missiles to defeat the US carrier group. That is exactly what happened in at least one war game that tested the scenario. In other words: Pearl Harbor 2.0 is coming soon, the next time we project power from a carrier group against anyone with an organized defense.

Thats newsworthy. I don't know if its true, but it parallels the fall of the battleship so much that it sounds plausible.
""" "Reliable, high performance, correct and maintainable" have nothing to do with the language you've chosen."""

I totally don't agree with this. Sure, it all comes down to good architecture and common sense but in reality some languages are simply not the right solution for interesting backend stuff.

Ruby is great for web apps and it is a clear winner there, but I would never ever use it for anything long-lived and high performance on the backend or 'service' side. As the Twitter guys discovered, Scala on top of the JVM is a much better choice for that.
Items at a church bake sale are usually marked up to extreme levels. Purchasing these overpriced goods is not fiscally responsible. Anytime our tax money is wasted we should be offended.

You bring up a good point; maybe allowing people to use tax rebates for parochial schools is illegal. I can't say for sure as I don't understand the law enough.