skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Macros Considered Harmful"

"Macros: They're for Nazis"

"Macros are for Dirty Hippies"

"Macros are Just Like Goto"

Solid, rational arguments against macro use. Very readable/understandable outline. Interesting topic.

I wish slideshare looked like this. :-P
And that 1993 speech by TJ Rogers had me thinking in a roar: Yeah!
This points out how strong status quo bias is even for neuroscientists. Which is an indication that we may be in for a very significant collision between reality (artificial general intelligence) and mainstream humanity. I think that it is going to be quite some time (years or maybe decades) before most people accept and comprehend the changes brought on by AGI and start to modify social and other systems to adjust to this reality.
Though I would like to see this actually implemented you may have better luck in the official suggestions thread http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=363
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The best quote was saved for last:

"Q: What do you get when programmers design a language
while trying to get something else done?

A: PHP"

Covers it all really.
Posted on Hacker News an April 2nd, but posted on Lipton's blog a day earlier...
Thin and Inexpensive Netbooks Affect PC Industry
Good Economic News Headlines Everywhere
Since they're running the PSUs near capacity. the batteries probably provide some additional headroom under heavy load spikes.
I really appreciate the minimal "case" these are in. Saves material and makes the containers lighter.
You just have to find the price index and adjust it yourself.

edit: someone already linked it
If you have are a lot of IE 6 customers, it may just be impossible to try to force them to switch browsers without losing a lot of customers. Not sure we really need anyone to explain that.

However, this post seems to go beyond that and basically be quite passionately explaining ways that we can happily accept and just deal with the multitudes of browser incompatibilities and inabilities. Probably, this guy makes his living off of these problems.

This person's attitude is absolutely sickening to me. The situation with browser incompatibilities and deficiencies is out of control. Action must be taken.
Wait... you know PHP? Why not just use PHP? Really, it may not be popular with the HN crowd, but use what gets the job done.
Have confidence in yourself, and get a prototype done. That will give you the experience you need.
Chicago 28-year-old made $70 million off cash loans, now he's buying slums
Check out: http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=672ce7db13a3ac1ec...
How big is the codebase for twitter? Are you limited by devs or production resources?

You can also swap in Java components when you need to so, depending on the architecture, you may only need a small Scala team. Java devs are everywhere. You also win by acquiring easy access to Java libraries.

Not saying Scala is the right choice... but there are big advantages besides "Scala is lighter than Ruby" -- and Scala is a lot lighter.
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One hedge fund? This is a fairly standard strategy. Analysts publish their predictions. Services like First Call aggregate them, etc.
Hmmm...so traders had a 1 in 4 shot of picking the correct company and they happened to do so? I remain unconvinced. I also remain unconvinced that this data is useful. It's not like we should let trader behavior influence safety investigations, right?
I think he's referring to Steve Jobs appearing on the same list as Sam.
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There is a weird disparity between the programmers I read on the internet and the programming students I know in real life. The programmers I read on the internet are self-taught, have side projects, and are intimidating. The programming students I know in real life are college-taught, generally don't have side projects, and aren't intimidating.

I think I belong to the second group more than the first. Should I switch to a different major? Or is there a place in the world for programmers who aren't hackers?

As a third option, someone might have some magical "how to become a hacker" advice that I haven't already read.
Go read "The Wisdom of Crowds" - it is chock full of examples like this.

No one is saying we should use markets for safety investigations - we are saying that we should use it predicatively.
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(Psst.. check out rfeedparser.)
yeah, on kgs, www.gokgs.com an online place to play Go, they changed everyone's rank to 9 Dan. It was funny because it was absurd and fun to see such a high rank next to your name. If they'd just increased everyone's rank by two, I'd have thought they changed their ranking algorithm or something, and been sad later.
He was an angel investor for a start-up founded by two friends of mine. A very decent guy, with high moral and ethical standards. There can always be an exception to the rule - even in the cash loan business.
The question specified "Within the last 30 years" - Branson started Virgin more than 40 years ago. Though I kinda wonder why Steve Jobs is on the list then, since he started Apple 33 years ago. Maybe he just squeaked in...
"IMO, the team should be either:

1) hacker, hacker

2) hacker, semi-hacker/semi-bizdev/semi-designer

3) hacker, bizdev

or something like that."

I was planning to reply in detail, but the above expresses most of what I wanted to say very succinctly.

I am on the other side of this coin. A lot of "idea people" contact me every day to "do enough coding for a prototype and then we'll make a shitload of money". This is how I separate the serious people from the non serious ones.

(a) Do you have (some) funding? If you don't have sufficient money to cover my expenses for a few months (and being in Bangalore, I can get by on significantly less than I could in the United States say, but otoh I get the more kooky "idea people") you have nothing to trade with. This question eliminates 90 % of the "I have a cool idea" folks

(b) Do you have deep domain knowledge? If you've worked in an industry 20 years you are much more credible when thinking of a killer product than if you are a freshly minted MBA with no record of having done anything significant in life but has ideas about " a twitter for insurance" or whatever.

(c) What risk are you taking? I get a lot of "offers" from people holding down corporate jobs who want me to work fulltime (of course with zero or minimal compensation) on the "idea",but who will hold on to their jobs till "the idea gets some traction". :-)

(d) If I build a prototype for you in the next 3 months (say) what makes you think you can sell it or raise money? Are you just hoping or do you have customers lined up (read Steven Blank's "epiphany" book for the kind of customer you need). Do you know any venture capitalists or angel investors personally?

So in a nutshell, if you have enough money to fund my lifestyle for a few months while I work on the idea, if you have a really good idea, based on deep domain knowledge, if you can market/sell the idea, and you are working fulltime for your startup then you get my attention.

Look at it this way. Most hackers add value by being able to build anything they can conceive of / believe in. They could be building anything. Why should they build your idea? The good ones are probably working on other interesting/profitable things already.

Oh yeah don't please outsource unless you know the person to be a really good programmer. As mentioned above it is hard for a non programmer to judge programmers.

Good Luck.
Thanks OLPC.
We did indeed work with gigabyte on that board.
Could you verify if Google still uses Hitachi Deskstar drives?

I recall reading an article about the testing Google conducted to find the most reliable drives, but they refused to publish the findings.
I'd rather go with linode or slicehost and not be locked into centos 5
I am not happy with them: recently I was looking for the API docs of the standard library for Ruby 1.9, and it turns out it is not available online anywhere. ruby-doc only has the 1.8 stuff. I spent hours trying to figure out how to create my own documentation with rdoc ad ri but eventually gave up. So now I don't even have the documentation of the standard library for Ruby.
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"It is behind the United States, Japan and other countries when it comes to making gas-powered vehicles"

As far as units shipped goes, its behind. As far as car factories within China (both foreign and domestic owned) serving its domestic population, they have a massive investment.

Happy to see such an announcement. I'll be even happier once major arteries of Chinese cities are "electric vehicles only". That's gonna be a while.
"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you... then they fight you, then you win."

Sometimes they laugh at you and keep laughing ;-)

seriously though, it is very tiring that the above quote from Gandhi is being used by the defender of every half assed idea as some kind of validation. (I am not saying that ruby or ROR is half assed). Sometimes things people laugh at are worthy of ridicule. And ruby/ROR has been around a while now, it should have moved to the "then you win" by now (and stayed there).
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Still, I worry that despite Ruby's niceness, a lot of time is spent developing around it's issues. Whenever I read about deploying Ruby, it just sounds scary. Memory munching Mongrels that have to be restarted on a regular basis? It sounds like a science in itself, whereas tomcat just runs and runs and runs. Less headaches == less headcount.
According to Wikipedia, GTE was independent even during the AT&T monopoly. It wasn't until the Bell Atlantic merger that they changed names to Verizon.
1 single practical piece of advice if you decide to drop out - make sure you set up the paid developer account along with both paid and free contracts before you drop out.

If it's done quickly, you have nothing to lose for waiting, if it takes a long time, count yourself lucky you waited.
I could hardly qualify tcc as maintainable. Remember that this piece of code won the ioccc.
NASA - Deep Solar Minimum
Think of all the features they pumped out instead of making a fancy looking blog.
"Unfunded liabilities" are an incredibly terrible and misleading measure of debt; it's like saying I owe two million dollars because of the money I'm going to have to pay over the rest of my life for food and housing. Obviously, I'm going to have to pay it one way or another--that doesn't mean you can count it as part of my "debt"!
I think it might actually be interesting to be able to create time paradoxes. It would give a different dimension to guerrilla warfare for example by being able to set up traps in time and space.

Though probably the hardest thing still left is to make it a fun game to play through, as it's quite easy to have a great idea but still make a crappy/average game.
I wished the article explained a little better why his business was not shady. From the article, it doesn't sound much different from the paycheck cashing places...

Maybe his new real estate business is more respectable but it was made possible by his previous business.

Can anyone explain why we should look up to him? I understand that there might be a need for "payday loans" but it still looks like exploitation.
Yep, â€™ means that the pages contains the UTF-8 quote character, but the browser renders the bytestream as if it's a single byte character stream.

The crux is that the basic alphabet is encoded the same. So you only notice it with special characters such as the curly quote and the em-dash.
Has anyone played with lcc - a retargetable c compiler?

http://www.cs.princeton.edu/software/lcc/
Maybe the article ignores that trade off, but Twitter is not really a "startup" anymore, so they are correctly leaving the startup mindset behind and beginning to analyze where they are wasting resources and what they can do about it.

If the expected total cost of rewriting and maintaining the codebase (over and above the cost of maintaining the current code, of course) to get an N% efficiency increase is less than the amount you will save on hardware, then it's worthwhile to do.

For a relatively simple application, which Twitter is, I'm unsurprised that a re-write/port is a fairly low cost ordeal, and might provide enough savings over time to be worthwhile.

I also take issue with the implicit claim that RoR is automatically more productive than Scala + Lift - Lift might be a little younger than Rails, true, but it's still a pretty solid piece of work, especially if you don't have to beat against the edges too much. And if you put some experienced Scala people up against similarly skilled Ruby folk in a "code race," I'd expect it to be a pretty fair match. This is not Java we're talking about, Scala can be extremely powerful in the hands of someone that knows what they're doing, and I imagine the Twitter guys have enough of those people that they'll do just fine.
is it just me or does every rich guy always have some super smug look?
My mother works as a reference librarian, and was explaining to me that a recent vacancy got around 200 applicants (people with MBAs, even).

What's interesting is that libraries have become the only way to connect to the ever important internet for people down on their luck. Since internet cafes are usually dark, seedy joints, I wonder if there's an opportunity to provide membership-based access to computers/internet in a comfortable setting. A library without books. I know my school's computer labs are always jam packed. There has to be a business model in there somewhere...
I think Jeff doesn't know C

Here: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001216.html

surely Stackoverflow is not making that much money.

But StackOverflow delivers, more so than most YC startups.
PhoneGap embeds a browser inside an app. MotherApp turns the HTML code to native Objective-C code. And so all your UI components are based on the SDK instead of the WebKit. You can also do things that browser couldn't do, like using the camera to take a photo and then upload it to a server.
Chatterous is really cool. I don't mind the blog layout, form follows function. What I do much mind is lack of a link to chatterous.com from the blog. So annoying.
There's also the trick way to do it, namely the distance from (x0,y0) to the line ax+by+c=0 is |ax0+by0+c|/sqrt(a^2+b^2)

This has the advantage that it generalizes to arbitrary dimensions. For example, you can do it to find the distance from a point to a plane (|ax0+by0+cz0+d|/sqrt(a^2+b^2+c^2)). The math behind it is pretty much the same, except you're projecting onto a normal instead of onto the line itself.
I'm not a ruby dev, but could you be more specific? Assuming you are refering to syntax, not speed: how is it good for prototyping but not "data-intensive tasks"
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Very, very cool. Kind of like the Obama promise-keeper website that I thought was cool, but then promptly forgot about. I'd like to suggest a couple of features, without which I probably will promptly forget this site as well:

1) E-mail or alert me when a prediction is verified correct, or expires, whichever comes first.
2) Mirror the URL at which the prediction is made.

Great work launching the site, and best of luck to you.
Daring Fireball == glaring fanboyism.
They did actually publish their results. It's an interesting read:

http://research.google.com/archive/disk_failures.pdf
That is so funny to choice JVM-based stuff is case when you need an accept/select/read/write hardcore (message passing) along with queue processing. Of course, you can do networking from JVM, and it works well in clean cisco-branded qos-enabled networks. =)

If one had had an experience of using java-based network tools over cellular or wireless networks, one knows.

At the same time, Erlang is around for a decade.
1) Go to http://www.dapper.net and create a feed which includes the # of points a post has, and possibly takes the page # as input.

2) Go to http://pipes.yahoo.com and use the dapper feed(s) as a source, and filter the feed by # of points.

Or, I'll do it for you if you buy me a ticket to the 99% conference.
Your argument makes perfect sense for people, no sense for corporations ("it's like saying GM owes X billion dollars because of the money they're going to have to pay in retirement benefits"), and some sense for governments.
I'm watching The Merchant of Venice right now, then I pop over here and read an article about a 28 year old Jew from Chicago who made millions of dollars lending people money at an extortionate rate. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with that; I'd do it myself had I but the wherewithal. I just found it funny. Like, you know his friends have to mention it to him occasionally, rib-jab style. Heh.
I'm puzzled how you can claim that he has high ethical standards when he ran a business whose entire model is to rip off poor people.
The 99% (A conference in NYC)
Has anybody has been to a conference like this before? Was it worth the price-tag ($300-500)?

Anybody going to this?
Take issue with payday loans not him.
Anyone got a link to the "video tour Google presented of its data center containers"?
Well said, just wanted to add that you only need to be a permanent resident, not a citizen, to be eligible for Medicare.
A post at the 'Green Data Center Blog' (http://www.greenm3.com/2009/04/close-up-an-old-google-server...) says that the pictures are of a "Google Server which is ready for retirement".
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That's ridiculous. You don't blame rape, you blame the rapist. That doesn't make any sense and you know it. Just because other people do something wrong doesn't mean it's fine for you to do it.
yes, that's exactly what he's saying. The dirty secret is that the variation in employee 'worth' to a company varies much more than a tight range of salaries based on statistical averages. It's not just talent; some employees become inordinately important due to their knowledge and acquired experience in a narrow area. Losing them might mean shipping a product 6 months late, which could be fatal.

Of course there's a potential here for employee blackmail, but hey, live by the market, die by it. It's a constant struggle to be 'fair' yet maximize your return on investment. These two goals don't automatically align.
Meanwhile Plex just launches a copy of Safari (I'm simplifying the process here) to get around any limitations. It's awesome.
But he ran a payday loan business. If you agree with me that this is an immoral business model, then how can you see the person who knowingly runs such a business as anything but immoral?
Why to reinvent the wheel? Some payment system from various storts is already here.
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One example: Ruby has slow IO and text-processing capabilities. I sometimes write pipeline tasks in Ruby or Perl. i.e. while line = STDIN.gets; puts transform(line); end. Typical disk bandwidth is 2MB/s in Ruby, and 25-120MB/s in Perl, Java, Awk, or C.

Beyond that, a lot of the metaprogramming features that make Ruby cool are also expensive when done repetitively.

Also, Ruby's threads REALLY suck. And it has impossible to track down memory leaks in the interpreter. Ask mojombo about fun with those.
More "thanks Asus", I think?
While searching for the actual battery patent, I ran across the modular data center patent: http://www.google.com/patents?id=7TypAAAAEBAJ&printsec=a... and also this power supply research paper abstract: http://research.google.com/pubs/pub32467.html

I was also surprised at some of the patents awarded. While the claims were very specific, the ideas were very generic, such as mobile payments via cell phone. Take a look for yourself: http://www.google.com/patents?zoom=4&q=inassignee%3Agoog...

If anyone finds the battery/server patent, I would be extremely interested.
All of the Ruby runtimes are unreliable (buggy) and very slow. Ruby syntax is perfectly good for "data-intensive tasks", but the current runtimes are not.
Rape is illegal and horrible. Payday loans are very bad but they can be a hand in desperate situations. Then again, the fact that payday loans are legal doesn't mean that they are ethical. I get that. But we don't know what his firm's policies were, if any measures were taken to prevent payday loan abuse, etc.

I find the debate about payday loans much more interesting than the debate of whether or not he should feel guilty for profiting. I don't know the regulations involved with payday loans but I assume they are very strict (and they should be stricter).
There 2 different tcc, from the same guy.
Only one gone to iocc. the second is fine.
indeed. in the end, the law is only a deterrent. if someone really wants to murder, the law and consequences won't stop them. similarly, if someone really wants to steal your code, they'll do it. contracts are just a very nice, cheap way to protect yourself and your company.
There are also Digital Mars, Watcom and lcc.
And also SDCC.
I'd say that it is less than "terrifying" to plot the national debt on a log scale. Most numbers in economics (and in nature) vary in an exponential manner. Consider, for example, inflation, interest rates, and population growth. Nature deals in ratios; it is only human afterthought that adds units to measurements.

One incidental result of the fact that numbers tend to vary exponentially is that the first digit of a measured number is most likely 1 and least likely 9. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benford%27s_law .
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He has a very high net worth to age ratio?
You make a good point I hadn't properly considered.

This is so against the current mindset of how purpose comes way before profit is even considered but this guy is apparently very good at making money. It's contrarian to the start up culture Google inflicted on all of us, but smart business is effective business. He is doing well even when times are very tough, he targeted potential growth and effectively switched from one business front to another.

maybe...
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And it would have been more useful to show it as percentage of GDP.
I didn't say "one" hedge fund pursues the strategy. I said I read about one. Also, aggregators do the exact opposite of what this hedge fund was doing: averaging. Whereas the point would be to measure their predictive accuracy individually.
Reflections on the Entrepreneurial Journey