skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Agreed. However, though HN does have a certain cultural cohesion, when it comes to "what is intellectual gratifying" people seem to differ a lot.

Case in point: for me whatever TS Eliot has written -- even an old forgotten letter -- is bound to be more interesting than any Coding Horror post (and it's not like I'm particularly crazy about TS Eliot). But the Coding Horror posts not only appear regularly on the front page, they are voted up higher than posts like Eliot's.
While I agree that programming and math are different fields, I have trouble believing that a great programmer would be unable to get through calculus (and vice-versa).

Another reason for the association of programming with math is that the two fields have an incredible intersection. As a math major, I took a lot of math courses that cross-listed with computer science or had a heavily computational component. Anyone who has taken numerical analysis or worked through the last third of the advanced algorithms book has seen the extent of this relationship.

There are huge classes of differential equations that can't be solved without programming. Same for optimization problems (the simplex method has to be one of the greatest intersections of math and programming in history). Simulation (and not just brain-dead random number slamming) has made it possible to solve probability problems that were unsolvable a couple of decades ago.

So while I tend to view math as domain knowledge for a programmer - ie., an area where you apply programming (like chemistry, real estate, acounting...), the relationship seems deeper and more natural.
I wonder if putting another browser on a CD and putting it in with a customers purchase would make any impact on the percentage of IE6 browsers visiting that site in the future. It could be a worthwhile investment if IE6 support could be dropped sooner.

For example if a business has many users that are on IE6, but the company put a firefox cd in the box of every order, would the number of users on that website using IE6 drop at substantially faster rate than if they didn't?
How much would everyone have if that happened?

My guess is somewhere around $50k.
Functional Programming and Collective Intelligence - II
I can't be too specific but one site in particular that I maintain has a big user base in education (from nurseries to universities) and I think it's very likely that this heavily influences the IE stats.

I know from experience (I've worked as tech support in schools and a college) that these establishments are normally the very last to push out upgrades to things like browsers. There's a big "if it works, don't touch it" attitude.
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I'm not qualified enough to comment on it. But I personally think Jeff is completely wrong. I'm a SDET (Test engineer) and am a history major. Couple of months back I asked people for math books related to computer science. I got some good feedback. I bought two books a)- What's mathematics b)- Discrete Maths by Susana App. I'm nowhere near a hardcore computer science student as I'm studying on my own. However, I've been able to solve recurrences, inductions and basic mathemtical proofs. I came across this beautiful function named "Ackerman function" and reading it was a pleasure. I don't take care of plants in my garden because it's necessary. I just do it for pleasure, literally. Same goes for maths though I'm pretty damm sure I will never able to do maths as good as Knuth but still.
I've a long way to go. But I've ordered some books on proving theorems. I don't intend to become a hardcore mathematician but I would just like to get through this once (just for the sake of pleasure). Here is a personal story a)Once I finished basic Discrete Maths I was writing a command-line based twitter client for personal use and using their API recursion just came as a natural choice (it was so natural that I had to think of how I did it after seeing my code running--believe it or not) b)- I'm fairly confident (and cautious) when I write recursive code now. I'm , by all means, a very average programmer but I would like to think that I've improved a bit.
I agree with Djikstra that learning your own language in depth is important for non-native speakers. Learning your language in depth widens your horizon and it creates clarity of thought. At least, I think it's important though I'm still a mediocre English speaker (yet).
Thor Muller posts an open letter to Jason Fried:

http://blog.getsatisfaction.com/2009/03/31/open-letter-to-ja...

...and negates 95% of the "he should have been nicer about it" complaints about the original post by saying "And while I would have preferred you sending us a note, or even posting it somewhere less trafficked than your popular blog, the fact is that Get Satisfaction is a huge proponent of public airing of grievances. You were right to bring it to our attention any way you saw fit."
I used to get lots of AOL CDs back in the day. It didn't make me in any way tempted to go with AOL.
You know what should be invented? A method of hiding information that encodes the messages in the grammar or spelling mistakes of a bunch of twitter accounts. Break that, CIA!
Place billions of orders to small breweries around the world and have them shipped a select few small towns.
Personally, I'm struck by the premise that Get Satisfaction, of all people, are being wronged by people publicly airing real, acknowledged grievances against them.
Can we please (as a race or at least the HN community) grow out of this eye-for-an-eye, two wrongs make a right crap?

OT: It reminds me of Obama's response when criticized about spending explosion: "Well, my critics clearly have short memories. The republicans increased spending dramatically, too!"
You can do entirely different fronts for browsers with different capabilities.
Most of the billion or so AFJ on the net today do not satisfy that. The only one that made me chuckle was the gmail autopilot. omg pandas.
When I use Blueprint, I like to add a "colborder-left" and "border-left" class (which isn't hard).
Sorry, this is off topic, but what software did you use to make that secant square on your blog?

http://bemmu.blogspot.com/2008_11_01_archive.html

Also, what license are you using for it - Creative Commons? Or is it copyrighted? I'd love to use that somewhere, but with permission/attribution of course.
Feedback Needed On Twitter Game I Created
Ponderosa buffet optical illusions: Variety makes us perceive smaller quantities
I think the point is that we're not talking about gratifying your intellectual curiosity or my intellectual curiosity, but one's intellectual curiosity. I literally groan out loud every time I see a Coding Horror story on the front page, but even I will admit it has a chance of satiating someone's needs vis a vis their own curiosity.

Note that joke and pranks, being fictitious by their very nature, are incapable of even a Coding Horror level of edification. Thus, it is my opinion they should be relegated to the bin of "off-topic" subjects.
I had this idea for a twitter game the other day, so I spent yesterday building it, and this morning launching it. It a quick test to see how well the people following you are paying attention. Was wondering if I couldn't get your guys' opinions and feedback. Thanks. Also my email is bradleyt.marsh at gmail.com if you find any bugs or anything.
I don't think you fully understand the market either. The Ford Ka is not in any way in the same league as the Smart car. IMHO the Big Three's obsession with out-competing the Japanese in the econo-car market contributed no small part to their demise.

Entire lines of "all American" cars were scrapped in favor of inferior ripoffs of Toyota creations. This continued well into the 2000s; look at cars like the Chevy Aveo, a Korean-made, budget econo-mobile that couldn't hold a candle to the Echo/Yaris' fuel efficiency nor reliability.

Ford was the first one to recover from this and reintroduce big muscle, which in the end was what the American market wanted all along (but couldn't justify).

I do agree on the interior point though. Why is it that I can sit in a Toyota and feel like I'm in a luxurious, well-appointed interior, and then sit in a similarly-priced Ford and feel like I'm sitting in someone's high school science project?
Uh, logic is a branch of mathematics. From wikipedia:

Logic is the study of the principles of valid demonstration and inference. Logic is a branch of philosophy, a part of the classical trivium, as well as a branch of mathematics.
"Subsidize" was perhaps not the right word. The USPS has become primarily a junk mail delivery service:

http://www.newser.com/story/21936/usps-defends-its-life-bloo...
Actually, the article talks about "the number of accredited angel investors – who tend to be angels who join organized angel-investing networks and invest in high-growth start-ups that go on to win venture capital". Sounds like a tech startup to me. This makes sense in this economy- even wealthy investors have less disposable income to spend on high-risk investments.
Which is hardly a worthwhile option for a reasonably complex website.
Doom Ported To Android
Nah, they do pretty extensive April 1st stuff every year.
Although I have no sources I was under the impression that the more sophisticated viruses already did this. Not for altruistic reasons but because they want exclusive control of the resources available.

I imagine it's similar to the biochemical changes that occur in a newly fertilized egg to prevent entry of additional sperm.

I could be wrong though. As I say I haven't exactly researched this.
"I could have been taking more challenging and diverse courses if it weren't for that."

I find this to be the single biggest flaw with our current education system.

For too many employers, your entire educational experience is reduced to a scalar between 0 and 4. Even diving has a "degree of difficulty" in addition to how well you executed the dive. Shouldn't education have something similar?
Or... you could just use a Javascript framework that takes care of that abstraction for you. This is seriously not a hard problem.
Venture Capital Returns Plummet
I don't think you've ever worked in the auto industry - most cars are not built outside of North America. In fact, I can't think of a single car that is built in a radically cheaper country like China that's currently on the American market.

You get imports from Japan, Germany, the UK, etc, but those are hardly cheaper manufacturing grounds.

The only major "cheap" source of cars is Mexico, and in general consumers have reacted badly to this sort of cost-cutting (the massive drop in the Mercedes-Benz C-series build quality after moving to Mexico has resulted in an exodus of buyers to other brands, same goes for VW).

By and large the cars you buy today, even ones from Toyota and Honda, are built in the US or Canada, both of which are hardly cheap when it comes to wages and benefits.

And keep in mind that Toyota and Honda are suffering greatly right now. I have many colleagues in the auto industry, and Toyota has already scaled back production in a major way - the demand is simply no longer there. IMHO the American public is waking up from decades of the suburban dream, and car ownership is something that will decrease in importance in our culture as time goes on, especially as new spending in mass transit kicks in and the urban culture takes center-stage.
Usually, everything an employee does links directly back to the company's books, by definition.
A little too simple for most of us on HN, but this would be a great teaching tool for computer science classes
Jeff Croft is the only reasonable adult in the whole thing
When I last looked at Blueprint, it looked pretty good for brochureware websites. But when I tried to use it for something else, I quickly ran into lots of limitations. I ended up coding my own CSS.

What do others think?

We really need a programmer-friendly abstraction layer over the mess that is CSS.
Silicon Graphics Declares Bankruptcy and Sells Itself For $25 Million
Thanks for your feedback!

I'm trying Arial fonts instead of monospace now.
hey! thanks for adding http://androidsnippets.org to your links! please feel free to add the feeds as you like! i will find a spot to link back to you :)
Hideous. A much better HN description is the Wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffer_overflow
It's possible that, if you really wanted inform us of the merits of cheese weasel day, you shouldn't have linked to a badly maintained site circa 1995 that provides no information apart from:

o there's cheese involved,
o it's on April 3rd,
o it has a song, but...
o the author doesn't know it

The quality of the link is often projected on to the quality of the submission.
Same thing no?
Best thing I have seen for a while. Good Luck.
My thought is the exact opposite: the front page is exactly the place to find the "Buy now" button and I think you should change the color of the download and purchase icons. I know it will screw up your nice color scheme, but it should be more obvious.

There is nothing pushy about this. The one thing you should absolutely never forget is to make it as easy as possible for people to send you money!
Python PEP 0401: BDFL retirement
Fight for Kindle access - Disabled Community organizes against Author’s Guilde
"And that's the problem with airing dirty laundry in public."

That's GS's mission, of course.

"Fortunately for Jason, the GetSatisfaction folks are obsessed with listening and responding."

No. Fortunately for GS, 37S started off with a public complaint and GS chose to respond quickly. "Cornered" or not, GS really had nothing to stand on if they'd opted to leave things untouched and 37S had taken the legal route.

They're not scrambling to make "customers" happy, they're scrambling to avoid a company with deep pockets and a bored legal team from noticing this little story, going to GS, and seeing "My Litigious Company's Customer Support Page".
Yep. The submission sucked. Sorry about that. I should have taken the extra time and found a better Cheese Weasel page, perhaps like this one: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=cheese+weasel or this one http://www.crunchgear.com/2008/04/03/happy-cheese-weasel-day... or this one http://www.bigwidelogic.com/index.php/2006/04/03/happy-chees...

Unfortunately, I was not happy with any of the few links I clicked on for Cheese Weasel Day. There is, regrettably, a paucity of Cheese Weasel celebratory material to share during this season of dairy and rodent festivities. So I just picked whatever came up first in Google.

My point was, however, that there is a place between Erlang innards and Defending IE6 where an article can be funny/enjoyable and yet also have an interesting side. If Cheese Weasel wasn't cutting it, apologies, but the point still stands.
I guess I lost, then. I computed the quadrillionth bit, but it turned out to be a zero.
1) is exactly what I suggested - a virtual model of the brain. I don't see any "but" there...

2) I'm no AI expert, so my opinion of this is pretty irrelevant, but I would be extremely surprised if we didn't have some form of human-level intelligence within the next 100 years, and I would not be surprised if we had it in the next 20 years.

3) Piecemeal progress that feeds back on itself is the essence of the whole Singularity hypothesis. Better brains come up with even better ways to enhance themselves, which makes them even better, etc. Technological progress can grow exponentially in ways not subject to the Malthusian limits.
Not all of us keep our leather bound "Life and Times of Colin Percival" on our desks.

Some of us keep them under our pillows so we can have sweet, sweet cperciva dreams.
Can't wait to come into work to find a disgusting piece of rotting cheese.
It's just a small Flash file, I don't quite see how you could use that anywhere?
As a counter-example, I present Lord Byron!
Good article. For C/C++ compilation I only know of GCC, Intel, Borland and Microsoft. And the last time I used Borland it ran on MSDOS. We could use more good compilers.
Agreed. I'm really very disappointed in the HN community on this topic. There was sheepish downmodding galore on the original thread, and emotional, badly thought out responses the likes of which I'm not used to here.

Looks like Jason Fried managed to bring out the worst in our community :-( It's particularly galling to see this turn on a pretty decent start-up like GetSatisfaction.
Brilliant point, and much more practical and useful than the law itself.
Can design save the newspaper? [video]
We started early, as one of the team will be out on Friday.

We had a Havarti, an Irish Cheddar, and a Blue Cheese mix.

None of it was under the keyboard though. We just put it on plates and ate it.

Cheese is much better than sugary candy -- unless you're lactose intolerant, of course.
One of the salient points that seems to be getting lost here is that the damage, at least as perceived by Jason (and to a large extent acknowledged by GS), was done in a very public way. So, simply fixing the problem going forward - as everyone acknowledges GS did, quickly and effectively - only addresses half the issue from the "wronged" party's perspective.

If you buy Jason's point, this pretty much had to be handled in a loud, public way. On some level, of course, there's no undoing what's done. Certainly a good number of 37s customers who got a bad impression from having their complaints "ignored" by 37s aren't going to notice this blog-spat, and their negative impressions will remain. That's life. But by bringing this to light publicly, and making an issue out of it, at least some of those people will have their impressions corrected, which is only fair.

All that said, could the phrasing have been a little more nuanced and less accusatory? Of course. Was Jason right to assume evil rather than genuine ignorance or lack of perspective? Probably not. (Though it might be reasonable to ask at what point ignorance, when it's so overwhelmingly in your favor, becomes negligence).

But the notion of "37s should have just talked to GS privately, which would have resulted in the same fixes" misses a good part of Jason's argument, which is that a public "offense" (for lack of a better word) ought to be addressed publicly.
Why not create a wikipedia entry collecting available information, then request the hacker community's input? There's nothing about Cheese Weasel day that makes it inherently ungratifying to intellectual curiosity (unlike april 1st posts, pictures of kittens, stories on politics, crime, sports, etc.) But the burden of highlighting a subject's interest lies with the submitter.
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I don't think you need to be mathematically inclined, but if you aren't then you probably won't enjoy programming very much (though you can certainly be competent at something without enjoying it). Not that daily programming involves a lot of non-trivial math, but for me programming is essentially a collection of little problems to solve, which I enjoy. Math, at least the parts of it I enjoy, is the same thing, a collection of little problems to solve.

Granted, this is coming from someone who enjoys math (the parts I understand anyway) and programming. I'd be curious to hear from someone who enjoys programming.
The FreeBSD people are rigorously testing LLVM, with the goal to replace GCC as soon as possible (for the base system only). At the moment, the base system compiles and runs for some architectures, as noted in http://wiki.freebsd.org/BuildingFreeBSDWithClang#head-afded4...
The "but these are good, smart people!" business verges on outright fanboyism.

When people complain about someone publicly criticizing a venue for public criticism, I have to wonder about their thought processes.
Same here. I'm at a huge site, and IE6 is still 30% strong.
From wikipedia:

A strong advocate of social reform, he received particular praise as one of the few Parliamentary defenders of the Luddites: specifically, he was against a death penalty for Luddite "frame breakers" in Nottinghamshire, who destroyed textile machines that were putting them out of work. His first speech before the Lords was loaded with sarcastic references to the "benefits" of automation, which he saw as producing inferior material as well as putting people out of work.

Other than the death penalty thing, support of the Luddites seems hardly defensible.
As much as I care about elegance and simplicity, the C compiler is one tool where I can accept complexity. Especially for large instruction sets architectures like x86 I'm willing to let the compiler cast it's dark magic on my for-loops to give my 10% here and there. I don't think any project, much less the BSD kernel, can sacrifice even 10% in x86 performance for the sake of simpler compiler.

That said, the licensing with GCC sounds very complex and burdensome too. FTA:

>>> As with other parts of the GNU Project, GCC uses the GNU General Public License, although it has a special exception for any parts of the compiler that are embedded in the compiled output.
Then complain loudly and repeatedly that someone had the effrontery to attribute...
"A Mathematician's Lament: How School Cheats Us Out of Our Most Fascinating and Imaginative Art Form" explains why there is a common misconception on what the mathematics is.

A complete prescription for permanently disabling young minds — a proven cure for curiosity. What have they done to mathematics! There is such breathtaking depth and heartbreaking beauty in this ancient art form. How ironic that people dismiss mathematics as the antithesis of creativity. They are missing out on an art form older than any book, more profound than any poem, and more abstract than any abstract. And it is school that has done this! What a sad endless cycle of innocent teachers inflicting damage upon innocent students. We could all be having so much more fun. </quote> ([pdf] (25 pages) http://www.maa.org/devlin/LockhartsLament.pdf )

Here's the corresponing discussion on HN http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=130499
The SEO Guide to Information Architecture
The link has now been changed to the Wikipedia one, so I'm not sure what was "hideous", but if it was the animated thing on Wired...I agree it's not for HN readers, but I actually sent that link to a few non-techies. So it's useful to us in that regard.
That was one of the first bits of advice in the book "Secrets of Power Negotiation" (something I read because I'm not a very good negotiator): Ask for outrageous concessions, you never know if they'll go for it. Lowball purchases hard and highball sales hard. Don't target what you think someone would rationally pay, just ask something ridiculous, and from there you've established your upper bound, and you'll work down from there.

Yet when confronted with a situation like that, I still find myself hesitating (or forgetting I can negotiate at all). It's something I still have to work on.

Fascinating story though, eventually charging 16x the cost you were originally charging ($1.2m vs $75k).
>What's the distance between a point and a line segment?

Does anyone have an elegant solution?
Fixing Executive Compensation
> 2. Index fund model:

Which index fund model? Weighted by market cap or some other measure?

Weighted by market cap means that you buy a given stock as the underlying company's market cap increases relative to the market as a whole and sell it as said market cap decreases relative to the market as a whole.

Can you do better?
Our man at the G20 protests
A Better, Cheaper Multitouch Interface