skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ideas and thoughts, and the people who express them, are separate, and ever will be so. Fixating on the originator of an idea is folly and childishness.

We are both fans of Ruby, I know that much. But do you love Matz, specifically? Follow everything he writes? Look to him for guidance in your personal life? Of course not, and me either. I can love his ideas seperate from him.

Same with PG. I wouldn't be here if I didn't greatly admire his thinking. But personally idolising the guy? Of course not.

Yes I have felt that before, when I was younger, when I was a child, and yes about a band. Now I consider it childishness, a wish to abandon one's duty to think for oneself. I may be wrong, of course.
Of course! Games are essentially just user interface - imagine if your software product didn't _have_ an underlying set of tasks that had to be accomplished, or even a mental model on the user's part of what was being done. How much more important would UI testing be?
Seriously, he broke up with his GF in an email?
> but later people start to get tired of it.

I assure you this is not the case in Los Angeles, Tokyo, Berlin, anywhere that car culture is the culture.

Once a place grows up with car culture, it very rarely loses it. That's the point of the article.
Reminds me of: http://daniellefong.com/2008/04/11/one-response-to-rejection...

People take this way too seriously.
This article is 2 paragraphs and 95% content free.
Good information. I thought Lotus just did the design and prototype.

Does anyone know why it takes Tesla so long to produce a car? Does a specific part (ESS, for example) bottleneck the entire operation?
And if a business sold that trojan horse and gave nothing to the builder, what then?
Why is there still no usable way for me to add my collection of games to BoardGameGeek? I've got to load the page for each game I own and click "I own this" separately. Even for a modest-sized collection like mine, this is enough to stop me from using what's obviously a tremendously powerful community tool.
If it's a small amount of money, it's fine for them to shut you down with no warning and keep your money?

Imagine if a bank did that with your $200 checking account.

My account was open for a month or less when they closed it.
First of all, go to the root of the website and see the promotional weight-loss program therein (no comment.)

Secondly, go through the essay again and you will find someone who is attributing his life choices, good or bad, to someone else who he has never consulted, met in person or even corresponded with:

> "Alone in my room I rolled on the carpet and screamed “I love you, Paul Graham.” "

This is after reading "A Taste for Makers"

>"Over the next three years I must have read A Taste For Makers at least twenty times."

Biblical exegesis?

>" I felt bad because your writings had more influence on me than my own father."

Completely unwilling to accept/admit that his life choices, influenced by an external input (in this case PG's writings), are still his own.

> "Admittedly I am a nobody compared to you but a part of me was a tad jealous of your success. "

No comment.

>At this point I figured you had completely lost it. Your stature as a guru was toast!

See, he wants a guru.
Ancient news AND light on details AND is essentially an infoworld frontend to a link to the announcement on the rails blog. Shame on the four people who voted it up.
Yeah, I kept expecting an announcement at the end that StackOverflow was getting into that business. It would make sense for them, since they've already done the hard part: creating a community.
Indeed, but I didn't want to get too off topic. Needless to say I agree with what you insinuate.
Flagged as a dupe: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=527706
It's useless to fight this trend. Schools need to recognize the need for change. They can:

1) Understand that outsourcing this way is an important skill and start training for it.

2) Teach subjects that are so damn engaging that students actually want to learn them.
Ha! I knew it! I'd love to see a Venn diagram of PG fans vs Stephenson fans. My guess is that the union is very large indeed...
Wow. Thanks for upvoting an article telling me no information is available at this time.
Strictly, the evolutionary fitness of an individual is the ratio of that individual's genes to all of the genes in the subsequent generation.

What Dawkins is likely saying (I haven't read the book), is that we can (or even should) forget about individuals and just look at relative gene frequencies (b/w generations); we'll see that some are selected for and some are selected against. And that this is actually the level at which evolution occurs.
As others have said, I find Settlers to be all about the initial positioning of your pieces. Choose wrong and it's a slow grind to an inevitable defeat.
Both Tokyo and Berlin suffered major destruction and were rebuilt after the invention of the car.

I was thinking more along the lines of European towns like Zurich.
I understand your point and your compassion towards others. Thank you. But this is "Hacker News", not "Self-promoters and gurus anonymous"; I'm sure allot of people enjoy and benefit from reading Dr Phil, Napoleon Hill, or the Rich Dad Poor Dad guy. Just not me.

PG will have to speak for himself, imo; does he want this place want to be a fan club, or does he want it to be a peer moderated discussion forum for entrepreneurial hackers?
Yes, I saw that this morning. (Was out and about yesterday.)

For my follow up, I was planning to say essentially what you've said:

If it takes a massive blog publicity campaign to get somebody to look into it, there's still something rotten in Denmark. (Aaaand... nobody's contacted me about the $2k from the Scriptaculous Adsense money.)
While there are very few hard facts in the article to support his claims, I tend to agree. The current business models for music start-ups do not work.

That being said, music industry executives are not as dumb as we see them. The music industry has a hold on America that is not going to fall soon. The industry is pushing artists to sign 360 degree contracts so that record labels do not rely solely on record sales. This will encourage distribution of free music in order to increase tour sales which record companies are mostly cut out of. This will make the ultimate surrender date a change of model, not a killing of the industry.

The venture industry is out now because they realized that the record companies control the market and aren't too eager to give others control of their product.
There is so much wrong with this post, I am amazed that it is allowed to survive in this community.

You condemned me for complaining about a diverse world, which is not true AT ALL. And then you imply that I should not be using windows. So you condemn someone for what you believe is complaining about a diverse world and then ridicule that person for using a windows partition to participate in open source as though there is no open source on windows?

How diverse of an opinion is that?
Well, I was hoping for a fresh outside perspective. We here in the U.S. have been shafted for so long that we've got 'Stockholm Syndrome'. It's time for some wrath - nothing better than an institution that deals with 3rd world dictators to call out breaches of law.

You could call it 'ethical awareness' that an outside perspective can contribute. Granted, given actual policy, the U.S. situation is unique and therefore the IMF's experience might not directly apply, e.g. I don't think that too many developing nations failed because of 'credit default swaps'. However, many bankers currently (and in the past) are in policy positions, and suddenly the lessons from corruption and aggregation of power in 3rd world countries apply.
John Gruber & Merlin Mann's Blogging Panel at SxSW
The proposed iPhone API for in-app charges may finally start to change this. And the extra costs will not reduce an app's popularity.

Before, your entire app revenue was locked up in that initial download. You either convinced people to try your app, or not.

But now, it's more sensible: if you have logical ways to extend your app, or improve it, there will be a way to let customers pay you for those enhancements.

And customers can use this to reward you for making an App That Doesn't Suck. You may (eventually) pay $20 for something in $.99 upgrades, but only if you use it for a long time. If you download an app that you end up hating, you've spent only $.99 instead of $20.

Then there's the fact that people seem to like incremental costs, even though they'd often balk at the equivalent cost up front. $59, or 3 easy payments of $19.95? $600 for World of Warcraft, or $15/month all these years?
Obfuscation Through Verbosity
C&K basically gives players more ways to affect the game's outcome through actual decisions (more of which are sorely needed). I haven't played it myself so I can't say how effective they are, but it's a step.
I worked at Amazon from 2008 to 2009. There were a number of recent college graduates there, but the average age felt a bit older than that. I don't have any data to back this up, but Amazon most certainly does not hire an unusual proportion of "young" people.
Why would anyone want to start a music startup when the bulk of the most popular music is controlled by a few very unpleasant companies?

Let's you say to started up a company tomorrow that looked ready to put the labels out of business and make a zillion trillion dollars giving everyone exactly the music that they wanted, no less and no more. Ask yourself, would the labels go to Congress to get a law passed that made your company illegal? And the answer you get to that question is "yes". And then the second question is, would Congress give them that law? And the answer to that question is also "yes".

Unless your startup can be fully successful without ever touching a single commercial song, it's doomed before it starts. Only an idiot would throw money or time down that rabbithole.
It's an ill wind that blows no good. The fact that the labels are killing the startups trying to stream their music could be the best thing that ever happened to indie music. TheSixtyOne is happily profitable streaming that.

http://thesixtyone.com
Quirky CMS Review by Jon Marks -- "Celebrity CMS Deathmatch"
> Take Facebook for example. It's a free service that most of its users get a great deal of value from. If asked, wouldn't many (by no means all) pay a small fee as appreciation for services rendered.

The value of Facebook is that everyone else is on Facebook, so if they started charging they would lose a large part of that value overnight. Services that start free and get big don't have a high success rate of going paid (Salon.com rings a bell). No matter how valuable something is, if you've been giving it away previously there will be huge push back when you start asking for cash.

Charging for premium features is a much better idea since you don't lose tons of users overnight. I'm not sure if it will work for Twitter, I guess it all depends on what those features are.
They just redesigned the backend; hopefully this'll make changes like that easier. Personally, every so often I want to make my own version, but the user data on BGG is so useful, I think it might keep others out of the market.
Or the lesson is, that the people who get screwed ought to be a lot more vocal about it to help other people in the future :)

I'm doing my part.
Some people care about aesthetics, some people don't. I think many hackers would be disappointed if Steve Jobs had thought "beige box ftw".
TwitterShouldHireMe.com girl admits use of Dreamweaver
(didn't find this up here already, thought it deserved a post)

Great podcast from two people who are recognized as the "go to" bloggers for their topics.

Gruber's introduction to the same podcast: http://daringfireball.net/2009/03/obsession_times_voice
Homeless guy starts a shop from nothing
A better game for that group would be Fluxx (http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/258) -> lots of fun, interesting decisions, but a massive element of luck. In Fluxx, if you know what you're doing and get lucky, you can win extremely fast. If you don't get lucky, though, you're stuck. I've found that people interested in a light-weight game always end up liking it.
Paypal's gotten a lot better. In part, probably, due to maturity and loud-mouthed complainers (I'll count myself in that group), and probably because of the govt stepping in and forcing them to act like the financial institution that they are.

You can call PayPal. There are actual people. They may be stubborn, but they are there. You can find out why your account is closed. And there are precedents.

Google Checkout: no contact. You can't call them. You can't email them. You can't appeal. No one, as far as I've been able to tell, is in charge of this beast.
If the sales person is truly experienced, s/he probably can get a job at a competitor that is well funded and will pay for his business lunches.

Early in the game, a startup cannot afford this guy. In such a case the hacker-founder(s) should opt for "passion+curiosity" over "skills".

This new addition to your team will be your "chief everything else officer". It does not stop at locating leads and calling them, creating new distribution channels, doing some grass root marketing/advertising, it also includes blogging, contacting bloggers, writers, local media channels (if that applies) and anything that at the end of the shift could increase your paying customers.

A passionate and curious, yet inexperienced guy can do all this and, on a few occasions, better than the guy who has been doing it for 15 years and is quite arrogant about that 1 million dollar sale he (accidentally) closed during his flight to Italy.
> Your original post was racist,

Because I totally applied my criticism to a people rather than a national government, right? Maybe you're the old-world type that equates nations with races.
Funny how your original post points out how the author is creepily following PG's life, and now you implicate that members of the forum are "PG Fans".
Nvidia Tesla Supercomputer (960 cores)
You raise a valid question, and real-world networks/clubs that users pay for and derive much of the same benefits as Facebook are very well-entrenched as justified expenses, e.g. Country Clubs, Fraternities. but is it reasonable to understand that users would oppose paying for the kind of value that Facebook offers? Yes, absolutely. The sentimental and communicative value it provides really is quite fervent, but I think we have a long way to go to evolve into a culture that will pay for something that, in the realm of social interaction (not including dating), is intangible, not physically interactive, doesn't provide us income, and can be had for free (emails/phone calls/picture exchanging), simply for the convenience it provides. Sure there are exceptions and maybe if Facebook charged from the beginning, the prospect of Facebook charging for its services might not seem so outrageous, but, for the average user, the contrast of how removed facebook's value is from our everyday physical life in contrast to how "physically" money exists in the real world I think explains this opposition rather well.
Is this true? Does anyone have a link for verification? I'm not doubting you; I do remember hearing this... just looking for the details.
Brief update (will write more in depth later today):

Some Google person with no last name & a fake-sounding first name (Sophie?) wrote me a very impersonal, automated sounding email that said:

"During a recent review it has come to our attention that your merchant
account ID amy@slash7.com was closed due to a technical error. We
apologies for the inconvenience it might have caused. We have re-activated
your account and you are eligible to receive payouts."

Riiight. A recent review. Guess that had nothing to do with the fact that you guys made this topic a front page news item.

So now I've got my $200. Hoo-ray.

But this is ridiculous. I don't care about the money. I will never use Google Checkout again, once my money is out.

And I plan to continue to agitate for them to improve their policies, because I know I'm not alone in being ripped off... I'm just more loudmouthed and vindictive than most people.

Also, no word at all on the over $2,000 USD that was in the script.aculo.us Adsense account.

That's Google essentially stealing from an open source project. I just can't believe it.

By the way... My thanks to all the people outside & especially inside of Google who have tried to look into this case to the best of their ability. I truly appreciate it.

The problem is that it's no one's fault that my account got closed, and therefore no one's responsibility to fix it, either.
Drweamweaver isn't Frontpage, use of the app by itself is not a positive or negative statement on anyones abilities.
I was about to cut and paste this very section. that is some serious user testing / design!
The luck and strategy part is also very nicely done in http://www.wesnoth.org/ which is inspired by Settlers of Catan and other such games. You might be repulsed by the graphics at first, but after a while you actually get to appreciate them and find that they fit in perfectly.
Because we are apes, our behavior follows the dictations of the endocrine system. Love, worship, depression, happiness, it's all an evolutionary con job.
Can we keep these programmers separated through the use of forks and patches?

For instance, I'll add feature X for $ and provide a patch or new RPM as the result.

The intrinsic developers can avoid demotivation (!) through "lack of awareness" of the money or patch. The patch can later be incorporated if the intrinsic developers want it.
You're not making any sense. Here are a couple of the logical holes in your argument:

1. Demand for programming is variable, not fixed. Our demand for great programmers is arguably much higher today than it would have been without OS, because so many companies only exist today because they could afford to launch using OS, not to mention all the hybrid business models that make money off of OS (Sun, MySQL, Mozilla, etc).

2. Technology makes some people redundant. That's the nature of progress, and every major technological shift is accompanied by hand-wringing over all the jobs that will be lost. But in the end, technological progress almost always results in net job gains, net productivity gains, net wage gains. Adapt.

I think your main problem is with free market economics, not open source software.
Right, I think when we starting making software the right way, most "features" will be most easily implementable as extensions.
Even I'm upvoting this comment.
If you're playing this game without the "Penny Rule", you're missing out.

SoC suffers from a bit of a compound interest effect: a few bad (non-producing) rolls at the beginning can screw you for the entire game.

To make up for this:

Anytime there is a roll on which a given player doesn't get any resources (and not because of the thief), they are given a penny.

During trading, a player can buy a resource from the bank using pennies for the cost of number of victory points showing.

This dramatically reduces run-away-winner syndrome.
Thumb up! I would really like to see something like this!
I don't understand. I am unabashedly a fan of PG's writings. That makes me a PG fan, I suppose. There is a pretty wide gap, though, between being a PG fan and writing a blog post entitled "My Love, Hate, Love Again, Affair with Paul Graham". You disagree?
You can use the * character for italics. The /thing/ is annoying.
Rebuttal to "Top CMS and Social Media Platform" article comments on Foliomag.com
And it's a great game. There's also a decent version you can download for XBox 360:

http://www.gamespot.com/xbox360/puzzle/catan/index.html
Can someone please make this game into an iphone/ipod touch app already
You mean intersection?
Even at many top grad schools, hardly any dissertation will be rejected. If you spend a long time there, grad schools will often be eager to hand you a PhD for a junky dissertation just to get you out the door.
Actually, you did sound like you were complaining about the diversity of platforms and environments that open source projects exhibit. And I didn't see him ridiculing you, just asking a question. I read the question as being this:

If you're running Windows on a 40GB partition, that implies that you are running something else as your main OS (or you need a new HD). That leaves OS X and Linux, and both are probably more widely used by and closely identified with the open source community, so why are you doing your open source work on Windows?

That's how I read it, anyway.
>> PG says all you need is a copy of K&R and a Linux box

Did PG really say this ?
Pick someone you have worked with before. People who specialize in deceiving others have a lot more practice than people have to detect deceivers.

There are tons of personable geeks out there who can both help build a product and sell them. Only work with people who speak your language when it comes to technology and that you've worked with before (preferably in technology projects - maybe schoolwork, or open source projects).
That's a great design hack. Did you come up with it?

If only someone could do something similar for mana drought/flood, Magic would be a pretty good game.
This article specifically mentions a student at MIT, doing a dissertation on Aerospace Engineering.
I wonder how much of this can be applied to code - to fix bugs, for example.
http://crossbrowsertesting.com/ gives you VNC sessions on a raft of preconfigured Windows instances.
Test-deployment? Interesting.

Personally, I don't get the "scary" aspect of the BigDog. It has surprisingly lifelike movement, but that doesn't alarm me. I actually winced the first time they demonstrated one keeping its footing after being kicked in the side.

Heck, it's probably one of the most benign machines we're testing in Iraq or Afghanistan right now...
I'd love me 2 of those. Has anyone had experience with CUDA?
Solid game, but not the best of the genre. Tigris and Euphrases FTW.
How enlightening. I wish sites like commandlinefu.com had more insight into interesting command line tricks like this.
Everything's gonna be alright?
Ok. Sorry I want not be arbiter of your business model.
I think you could also rephrase that as, "know your audience."
There should be a convention for ghost twittering for those who want to do it transparently.

For instance, &ghostwriter or *ghostwriter.
I've played Cities and Knights, and I like it a lot better. The progress cards let you affect trade, other players, or speed development, and offer some additional strategy. The aqueduct ability (#3, paper) even minimizes the effect of a dice-induced resource shortage. The constant threat of barbarian invasion always results in a race for knights, and the accompanying strategies of trying to one-up the other guy.
This:

American prenuptial deals have included a wife being able to limit Sunday football games to one a season, and another having to limit her weight to 120lb (55kg)

made me think of this:

http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/0217062contract1.html

(Rated R for evil creepy fucker.)
I don't agree with you on completely disregarding experience.

They make passionate idiots too.
Having just been admitted to a top-tier graduate school after attending a state school for undergraduate (in-state tuition rocks), I'm tempted to agree with the article. Especially for undergraduate work. For me, graduate school will (ideally) be about networking & deep knowledge rather than 'figuring out what I want to do' which is what is true for a majority of undergraduates. Still, the best schools are really just about the best peers, thats it. And that does end up making a difference for some people.
Is America the New USSR? :)
In part, probably, due to maturity and loud-mouthed complainers

I think the federal class-action lawsuit on behalf of customers who had accounts frozen may have played a bigger role.