skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There is one problem with this article: the line at the end.

> What do you think of the prank? All in good fun, or did SlideShare cross the line? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

This suggests that majority vote rules in situations like this.

But really it should not.

So, for example, if I had slides on SlideShare (I don't), and I had fallen for this, then I'd probably just laugh it off (along with some irritation; April Fools Day pranks stopped being funny around 1980, okay?). However, other people, who might use this for more "serious" things, have been significantly wronged by the SS people. Does my laughing it off make this okay?

I guess it all boils down to two points.

1. If you are in a situation where people entrust their reputations to you, then you need to take this seriously.

2. It does not matter in the slightest if 99% of those people think it's okay to do damage to those reputations. Don't.
-> "the largest issues I've run into with Ruby typically deal with people trying to be too clever"

I agree with you about Thought-to-Code and even though I argued in favor of monkey patching earlier, the willingness to use it without discipline has raised a red flag for me and is the biggest sign of this "too cleverness" that you're referring to (at least for me). If Ruby becomes the new Java, maintaining irresponsibly monkey patched legacy systems could be a nightmare for the enterprise developer in the years to come.
FWIW, I'm on the same phone and can access and run the app.
What's your beef with the "Luddites?" Byron was supporting the original Luddites, not the knee-jerk technophobes the term has come to represent.

I don't condone their use of violence, but I don't find it any more morally appalling than a society that is happy to reap the benefits of progress while washing its hands of the very real harm that progress can inflict on a minority of its members, particularly in a society with limited economic and social mobility.
Hm. I shall have to call Virgin Mobile on the way home and find out WTF.

Thanks.
Ebay Launches Selling Manager Applications Beta
I'm pretty sure he meant Sama, unless he meant sama:

http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=sama
I don't really know Python's community that well, but I would wager it's probably due to sheer size. I disagree with PG's "law of averages" regarding choosing environments - working in a language that has more users does have significant benefits in my opinion.

BTW another example that comes to mind regarding beginner-friendliness is how long it took to get Rails working with Apache. Before Phusion you were supposed to run your own mongrel cluster or similar fringe solutions - it was insane to ignore the world's most widely installed server. Personally I only started considering Rails production-worthy after mod_rails turned out to be fast and stable. Sure, I can run Thin/nginx or whatever, but I don't want to learn a new server (and wait for it to mature) just so I can use Rails.
Yes, it can be interesting to learn about the family life of famous people. Often it contradicts the public side. Gandhi's is a striking example.

I found the article about Orwell's son a good read. Not sure why the author assumes having Orwell as a father would be "pretty grim", though.
Ah! My bad.
Define "astute". By some measures, Eliot was pretty damn adept politically.
Nice. I only follow HN in Reader, and this makes that even easier. Thanks a lot. Now if we could only get full feeds from the NYTimes...
It's a good suggestion but not so applicable to the strategies I listed for the average investor above I think. These are all long term strategies. Finding the next Google or working hard to find the rare highly valueable opportunity, something which perhaps there is only a handful of great ones in a lifetime doesn't lend well to testing. Starting out with fake money is a great idea though.
Now that this made it to the front page, I just realized that the page content is not pulled correctly by the Python. :)

The Readability bookmarklet seems to do it just fine. I will need to investigate.

It seems to work fine with most blogging systems. I don't use one. I use Markdown, Python and rsync.

UPDATE: I received a request to add a Comments link to the top and did that. Makes sense if you like to check the comments before deciding what's worth reading. It will probably take a while before the code is reloaded.
OpenLifeGrid enables instant virtual land purchases
Very simple: I'm a greedy bastard.
I did get the email, and I did send the tweet. However, I assumed it was a bug in their traffic counting code.

However, there is a subset of the social web that measures worth with simple numbers (wheter it be # of Twitter followers, FeedBurner subscribers, or SlideShare views). For the people who fell for it and are always talking about their big numbers, I would imagine that this could make them appear foolish, mostly because putting too much stock in those numbers is foolish in the first place.

I think it was a brilliant campaign. We are all talking about SlideShare and #bestofslideshare was a trending topic on twitter. I have a sense that the online slide sharing space is getting more competitive with new services launching, so why not use April 1 to help assert your position as the market leader.
Same for me. This combined with the Google Reader keyboard shortcuts makes it much easier and faster to go through HN content.
I think that the "right-brained" software engineers and programmers defended, especially in the comments, are probably why so much software sucks so bad. I think Dijsktra overstates the importance of "proving" in programming, but the necessity of mathematical type thinking for a clean design and a clean program is fairly clear.
I'm not qualified to respond to your points about Phusion and mongrel but on the previous point about the size of the community, are you also finding as a result that the job market for Ruby positions is sparse (forgetting about the economy for a second)? That's the impression I have from the job boards but you work in the field so maybe you have a better idea.
Advances in Data Safety Drawing Wider Attention
Thanks, I'll check it out. I was deliberately trying to avoid the land of acronymns and unnecessary complexity though.

I find it interesting that almost all of the most truly interesting and valueable things I have read were written in plain english by people that strive to keep it as simple as possible. It's far too rare unfortunately.
This is great, thanks so much for this!
Failure to make a clear distinction between luck and "force of will" is pretty foolish. Yet it is clear that Mr. A. is not the Yth. (Thanks to the fownders who got it up before the Google homepage. Yay you.)
It's not a very good Java either but does that really say anything? Java's not a very good Ruby. We can go round in circles.
Thank you for all of the feedback thus far!
For some reason the #s in authors, don't match up with the actual author profile.
A brief Sam Altman story:

Back when I was in college, I decided to be an RA for a Freshman dorm during my Junior year. Two of my freshman in my dorm were Sam Altman and Blake Ross. We took a class together called Internet Technologies (CS191i).

Our first assignment was to build a VERY rudimentary web browser in Perl; all it did was, open a socket, accept and validate a URL as input, and print out the result of a GET request from a web server. The creator of Firefox was assigned "build a web browser" as homework!

Needless to say, both Sam and Blake dropped out of school before the end of their Sophomore year.
At the time, my roommate and I used to have these conversations on how the prevailing focus in many research labs was more towards simply publishing papers -- which does not necessarily translate to breakthrough, innovate, fundamental research that often takes patience and a long hard look at problems.

The pursuit of publications we felt like it was a factory is a sure way of mediocre/average research that gets lost in an increasing pile of papers.

I remember reading this article then, many times.
Yahoo sideline: desktop client for real time twitter search
That's a generic argument not to do anything, ever.

The discussion is (as stated in the article) about weather a drug is safe for non-medical use. That is, for various degrees of "safe". Safe means one thing when given to severe cases of cancer patients, and a completely different thing when sold to children over the counter (like vitamins for example). The problem is, there is a general bias against computing the last kind of "safe".
That was indeed my response. But it lessened my respect for the people in question.
About asking for a bonus - it sounds arrogant, and you come across as too focused on the money.

Instead of this, quote a rate you think you're worth. Then do great work. Your bonus will come in the form of increased demand/word of mouth. Adjust your rates accordingly.
Apple is also one of the few companies that comes out with unique hardware. When you can start from your own simple designs it is possible to engineer unique and genuinely more useful hardware (see: the new battery in the 17in Macbook Pro).

Unfortunately, the cost of developing from the base case as described in the article is very high - and reflected in Apple's prices.
Songkick (YC + Series A VC) are looking for tons of positions, including front end designers.

Others worth contacting (dunno if they're hiring, but all doing cool stuff) include Dopplr, Last.FM, Moo, Habit Industries (YC) & Playfish. Lots of others that I can't think of right now.
You're lucky that in those cases you were able to recover in only two days. The time it takes to get back on track can be proportional to the size of the project so imagine if you were dealing with an enterprise system written in and monkey patched in Ruby and you had a similar problem. Depending on your luck, you might get back on track or you might end up having a lot of extra time to work on your resume.
Actually, all of those computations "which ought to result in a numeric answer" are done according to the principles of logic. Maybe I see it more clearly having taught myself calculus and more advanced math without having someone to "explain" things to me, but all mathematical problem solving is also logical reasoning.
I can code Ruby/Rails/Merb (not an expert by far, but I may be able to get the job done), am in college looking for something cool to do, and would be willing to co-found (or develop at a fee) if I liked the idea.

Hit me up at the email in my profile if interested.
Hotel + Helicopter = hotelicopter
I think the error here is in remarks like these:

From Croft: "You’d like to think these kinds of companies would be supportive of one another, especially in times like this."

There's an underlying assumption here of some sort of community - or even family - with commensurate obligations. In the eyes of some, Fried has somehow breached a sort of familial allowance, making him the bad guy in their eyes. In the way most people wouldn't generally go first to the police if their teenage cousin stole something from them (but instead work it out among the family), Fried shouldn't have publicly mentioned that GS wronged them, but should have kept it in the family and out of the sight of outsiders.

Except, of course, there's no family here. "Small, web-centric companies" isn't a community, it's just a commonality.

To continue the example above, here's no obligation upon you to cover for some stranger or even acquaintance's theft of your belongings. If you opt to announce where other people can hear you, "Alright, you stole this thing of mine; I want you to bring it back," instead of going to the cops, you've hardly the bully who's handling it wrong - you're being generous.

From Dimon: "I think the problem is still the perception that the GS team is made up of fundamentally bad people, and I assure you that’s not the case."

The fallacy here, that actions are innocent and harmless unless they're carried out by "fundamentally bad people", is very common and just as harmful. A company (or association, or government, or any organization) doesn't have to be staffed by escapees from Mordor to do harmful and abusive things - nor even outright unethical things.

People defending GS from criticism on the grounds that they're obviously not monsters (for heaven's sake!) miss the point that it doesn't take monsters to hurt other people, even in relatively elaborate ways. Human beings rationalize, human beings justify, and human beings miss the forest for the trees.

Put these two attitudes together, and we get the response that Fried should have kept things in the family; after all, those GS kids obviously didn't hurt anyone with their peccadilloes.
Google uncloaks once-secret server
"I mean stuff like having better documentation, for example, online, free, in googleable format"

Do you mean for the core language? Are you not happy with http://www.ruby-doc.org/ ?
This is a good point... As an advertising campaign, it was deviously clever. I would love to see the traffic spike they got from Twitter, and the successive spike from the buzz around the story.
"5 years ago, the total protected areas in Quebec were 1% of the province. Now it's 8%."
IE6 needs Your help
I, for one, thought that the popularization of the "Fuck Apache" mindset was one the most positive results of Rails' ascendancy.

I don't like Rails, but I hate Apache.
Thanks for the link. Pointers to other writing by Rodgers would be useful. In terms of books, I could only find one from 1993: "No-Excuses Management" [http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_b?url=search-alias%3Dstrip...]

Note also PG's typo ("Rogers" should be "Rodgers") which slightly hinders searching.
Wait, so employee A who works late nights and busts a gut to ship gets a pay rise, which means employee B gets a pay rise even though they didn't?

Or is it that employee A wouldn't get a pay rise because then employee B would have to get one?
Ah Apex Designs, I remember when they published this game on the Gameboy Advance. Except they ran into issues with their publisher/distributor. I was living in Europe and was able to buy it via mail order.

Its a really fun game with great replay value. I think it originally started life as an Amiga game. Great to see the developer getting some reward out of it, finally.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=278311

You can read what he says about doing bizdev. Considering he got big companies to work with his startup, I think there's probably some nuggets in there.
As someone that runs a profitable company I can tell you right now that my company would a) not be able to hire really awesome people and b) lose all the better guys as a result of this policy.
"But I AM saying that it was irresponsible for 37s not to give GS the chance to rectify the situation before deciding to go ahead and try to ruin GS's reputation."

GS wronged 37S in a way that was probably legally actionable. 37S has no responsibility to GS to forbear from criticizing them. They opted to criticize and see what GS did instead of starting legal actions; this was generous of them. (Like I say elsewhere on this page, there are some fallacious assumptions being made by those attacking Fried.)

The only irresponsible party is GS.

"I would argue that it's hard to deal with any criticism that you don't know exists..."

Indeed - except that the ultimate complaint is that 37S made their complaint in a venue and fashion that resulted in a lot of people, including GS, seeing it!
the philosophy department only teaches the class

Most or all undergrad pure logic classes, as far as I've ever seen. There aren't usually a whole lot of pure logic classes, so it's entirely possible that your school(s) might only have had one.

Philosophers deal with words.

Philosophers deal with logic in arguments. I took a couple logic classes during my undergrad and they were entirely symbolic logic. I also took a couple philosophy classes, and they used symbolic logic extensively to describe the flow of logic in arguments. Skimming through MIT OpenCourseWare indicates it's similar there: http://is.gd/qaE0

If you take a graduate-level math class in logic ... even if you just take an upper-division set theory class, you'll learn more about mathematical logic

So you are saying that heavily mathematical logic is more heavily mathematical? Interesting. Do you also learn about tautologies in these classes?

I'm guessing that you are actually implying that mathematical logic is more useful to programmers. As I stated elsewhere, during my undergrad I took classes that touched on both philosophical and mathematical logic concepts and I definitely find myself using both. In my experience: symbolic/philosophical concepts in high level development, symbolic/mathematical concepts in low level development.
Oh memories, I remember spending a lot of time here:

http://www.sgi.com/tech/stl (SGI's STL documentation)
If you aren't a coder yourself, hiring a coder can be incredibly challenging. Recognizing a good hacker vs. a bad one on a site like rent-a-coder or elance when you aren't a good hacker yourself is pretty much entirely random. In fact, it might be worse than random, because the worst developers on sites like might be the best at fooling non-hackers. I've done (non-core competency) development jobs through both, and I've gotten pretty good at sussing out who's going to waste my time by delivering code I'll have to throw away, and I've been a programmer since I was a kid, but I still make mistakes sometimes.

I've noticed a trend that leads me to believe that non-hackers would end up choosing the wrong developer in more cases than random chance would dictate:

The best hackers have a tendency to be honest, even if it means they're less likely to get the job. They will point out their limitations, explain what they don't yet know about the problem domain, and talk about the interesting (to them) aspects of the problem domain (which are probably the least interesting to a non-programmer). Now, great hackers aren't the only people who are honest, of course...which further complicates things. Folks who just don't have the skills may be setting their sites a bit too high, and will fail without intending to do any wrong. So mere honesty doesn't do the selection for you. It just makes it easier for someone who understands what needs to be done to choose the person to do the job.

The worst hackers don't care, because they know they're going to deliver shoddy work no matter what they say. The worst providers on these sites offer the world, and will claim tons and tons of relevant experience. They will rip off existing products or websites and slap a new coat of paint on it and call it a "prototype" that they made just for your bid. They will produce copious requirements and bid documents to snow you into thinking that because they can produce so much specific documentation about the job to be done it means they actually understand the problems.

So, while I've had occasionally good luck with outsourcing work via a site like that, I would not recommend it for someone that doesn't have some experience interviewing developers and then working with the developers after they've been hired, especially if you don't have a lot of development experience yourself.
Don't waste time looking for a technical co-founder. If all you have is an idea, you'll never find one. Ideas are a dime a dozen, and most programmers get pitched all the time with "build me my site, do all the work, we'll make millions, and you'll get half of equity!"

So unless you already have legitimacy by getting some funding, you'll just be wasting time.

The problem is that if the programmer truly has the entrepreneurial spirit to take the plunge, chances are that they are already doing their own startup, and don't need your idea.

I say go with one of those freelancer sites, get someone to build you something basic, and then when you have a more or less ready product..then you can try looking for that techie co-founder.

This way you'll actually have something to offer to the coder, and on the plus side, you won't need to give away most of your equity for something that'll cost you a few thousand dollars.
He's on a better list:

http://www.paulgraham.com/heroes.html

I've learned a lot from Rtm about various things, especially hacking, but not much about startups for the simple reason that we both learned about startups at the same time from the same experiences.
I got the email but didn't act on it. Mainly because if I was a 'slideshare rockstar' the additional bandwidth from downloading the mp3 for the slidecast would certainly have taken me over the bandwidth limit on that hosting account. I assumed that slideshare had simply messed up its hit counter. At the time I felt this was unprofessional.

Now that I know it was just a practical joke and not a technical blunder I still think it was unprofessional only now for different reasons.
They also bought Cray.
Reminds me of overcoming bias' stuff. For example:
http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/02/who-are-macro-experts....

We really need this sort of thing to take off ...

Unfortunately, the public hates them. When DARPA created a prediction market (PAM) there was so much public outrage that the head of the agency was fired.
Is there any concern here for the missed click-throughs for content creators for purposes of metrics and/or advertising revenue?

I've not been in a situation to have to worry about either but I know that site owners make a conscious decision when they formulate the contents of their own RSS feeds. Some clearly don't want to provide all the goods in feed readers without an ad stream to compliment it.

I haven't gone through a lot of the feed yet so I apologize if I am missing some way you've already addressed this.

Regardless, Thanks! I really appreciate this feed.
Please correct me if I'm wrong, but what freelancer isn't freelancing for the money? From my experience, most (not necessarily all) are freelancing as a transitional period from working full time to self-employment in a startup or in between full-time jobs. It's a very tedious thing to make your life-long career, so why not optimize?

I charge a healthy rate considering the difficulty of my work, and it is less strict on my performance. Meaning, if I don't provide a perfect product every time, it's okay, because the client is paying a competitive rate, but if I do well, as I strive for with every project, they know the option to pay for the delivered excellence is there.

You'd be surprised how many clients spring for keeping their designer happy in return for promise of future results.

Regarding the arrogance, I think having a healthy dose of self-confidence is an asset to your career. It lets you realize you can say no to a client, turn a bad client down, and it creates a certain level of mutual respect I find a lot of designers oft complain about not having.

There is a large difference between arrogance and self-confidence. Arrogance is asserting, confidence is suggesting.
I'm both a friend of the founders and a customer (conference/business user). They're definitely not the kind of people who believe "any publicity is good publicity." That said, they have a wide variety of people using the site, posting everything from soft-porn to serious business decks. While a well-done gag does get you a lot of traffic and attention, it's hard to do it right when you're dealing with such a diverse set of users. They've learnt their lesson.
Do you believe it to be truly efficient or just the most effective hypothesis? For example perhaps where it is inefficient this is indistinguishable and highly random therefore not terribly useful?
Well in a way that's what happened, but that company was Nvidia not SGI, since many of their folks left to join NVidia.
This seems real despite the post date.
Awesome! Thanks Nirmal! Talk about customer service.

Now, if only it had better twitter integration ...