skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm not so sure that liberal licensing leads to popularity. One obvious counter-example of your supposition is GNU/Linux vs. BSD.

Incidentally, the last thing the FSF is worried about is popularity, yet look at how popular GCC, Emacs, bash, and other GPL'd software is.

Licensing your software with a very liberal license may help make your software more popular with some large companies who are in a position to take advantage of it (and I suspect timing is important here as well), but I'm not so sure it makes your software popular with the developer community.
Thanks, I've been living in Windows land and need to branch out. It's a 2 year old Dell. Nothing jumped out at me on the incompatibility list so I think I'll take my chances.
If I am correct, this has been done before...

[Though he did exactly what I planned. I just picked up Programming Collective Intelligence, and plan to write the examples in Ruby... ]
That plugin was a little buggy when I used it this summer. If you do something with MzScheme you're much better off with DrScheme. DrScheme is pretty good, and getting better - they just added rudimentary code completion, for example. You can just use DrScheme with Kawa, too, but you lose the REPL (which is not acceptable in my opinion).
According to the article,

One concern was that even if Mr. Paulson bet right, he would find it hard to cash out his bets because many were in markets with limited trading. This hasn't been a problem, however, thanks to the wrong bet of some big banks and Wall Street firms. To hedge their holdings of mortgage securities, they've scrambled to buy debt protection, which sometimes means buying what Mr. Paulson already held.

In other words, Paulson was buying mortgage insurance contracts, driving their prices up, and now banks are buying those contracts from him (at higher prices than they would have if he hadn't been involved in the market).
He never had to debug complex python code. It's a nightmare.
I don't see any other way to handle those situations, really.

If you're trustworthy, then operate in full daylight.
The best living programmer I know cut back to a more normal schedule to spend more time with his wife and kids. (I have seen him program a cooperatively multi threaded app that's resistant to memory errors on a 16khz embedded chip with around 380 bytes of ram and 2000 bytes ROM data.)

You can work 100 hours a week but you will never match a 9-5er that's 30x more productive than you are.
This would get my +10 upvote of the day
I think the light-hearted (whoops! we screwed up!) tone is the absolute wrong one to take. Have you seen some of the comments? The over billing mess caused a lot of damage to their reputation. It wouldn't be a big deal, but refunds from an overcharge can take several weeks. If they charged someone's checking account, that's bad news.

http://blog.dreamhost.com/2008/01/15/um-whoops/
I would this would be a benefit, having a keyboard so thin it feels like typing on the tabletop. Wouldn't that lessen the risk of RSI?
pg: It should be Affero GPL. You won't overthrow Java et al anyway, but if Arc is as good as we all anticipate, choosing AGPL may really help the free software.
He didn't drive the prices up (at least not by much). The fact that more and more people started defaulting on their mortgage drove up the price of insurance. That's what he was betting on (and he was right). So if he didn't make the money someone else would have (whoever was holding on to those insurance contracts).
the 50th O the 50th
symlink: Like they would anyway. Ha ha bloody ha.

The license should be Affero GPL.
Compared to Omnidrive, DreamHost handled a technical problem infinitely better.
That's a good point. He broke one of the cardinal rules of trading:

Housing remained strong, and the fund lost money. A concerned friend called, asking Mr. Paulson if he was going to cut his losses. No, "I'm adding" to the bet, he responded...

By comparison, as Ed Seykota put it in the book Market Wizards, "The elements of good trading are cutting losses, cutting losses, and cutting losses."
It's certainly complicated, and depends on several factors.

One thing that's important for languages like Tcl is that they can be embedded within other projects, and for that reason a liberal license was very important. Of course, it's certainly not the only thing you need. The GPL is probably ok for "finished product" sorts of things that you don't need to link against to utilize it.
It's been said to death various places on the internet, but the lack of inputs, and the lack of a easily replaceable battery (it's "integrated") are a huge loss. It may be wireless and have few wires to deal with, but you'll have to deal with USB hubs and other cables when it's in "desktop" mode. Traveling usage (for anyone other than those who carry spare batteries) will probably be OK though slightly inconvienenced. I wonder if Apple will come out with a USB "dock" for desktop mode.
My Common Man Take On The Apple Macbook Air w/video
Wow.. Yeah, that one is way over the top. It seems like customers are going to be upset that he's spending time putting together a silly blog post instead of fixing the problem. Status updates are great, but childish posts.. Not so much.
Using File Filters in FileZilla
I think the best part is the mouse gestures. It doesn't actually add any functionality that you didn't have before but it makes the whole experience more organic and you forget you're using a computer. That's what apple does right.

This machine is a big step b/c it's shedding unnecessary historical devices like the optical drive. It's leaping into a world where there is always a connection between machines and to the internet. All the while they are meeting and sometimes surpassing old functionality with software that makes networking a lot easier (bonjour, time-capsule etc.) While slashdot is lamenting the lack of "options" apple is striving toward a machine with no ports and no keyboard. They want as little friction as possible between you and your experience. The macbook air is just a temporary stop-off on this trajectory.
Not my experience. But I've primarily worked in places where programming talent was front & center, valued, and the cost of replacing a good developer was high.

If you get a 3% raise at a big software company, that's usually a sign you're not doing very well and might want to think about leaving. A healthy raise should be in the 6-12% category. Your top co-workers are getting raises like that. Compounded yearly, it adds up.

Not to mention the component of negotation that comes into play. You'll have similar employees making $60k next to ones making $90 or $120. Not necessarily all skill driven.

Worry about saving a little out of each paycheck and getting good returns in the stock market? You're better off doing well at work and getting a healthier raise.

Pick a good place to work. If you care enough about your career to spend time on ycombinator, but you're working in the back office of a healthcare company, you should seriously think about upleveling your employer. Remember, you can always fire your boss. Find a place to work where the software talent is the main thing. Not back office support. Not consulting. A place where software drives the business from the revenue side, rather than being a cost center.
I didn't read all 900+ comments, but I wonder how many were affected like the first commenter (overdrawn bank account). Dreamhost isn't likely to refund the cost of the overdraft fee, which unfortunately, can get expensive depending on your bank. It'll be interesting to see what transpires in the coming days.
Rules of thumb can be applied without thinking to control both chance of failure and chance of a crazy success.
Wow... nice job Dreamhost!
Yes, but that's the point.

These types of risks are always brilliant when you win, and stupid when you lose. Articles like this one teach you little, other than the value of good luck, and great timing.

(also, for the record: I agree wholeheartedly with the spirit of his investments; I'm a housing bear too. But I'm also realistic enough to know that he got lucky, using a decidedly risky investment strategy. With hundreds of millions of dollars short in an admittedly irrational market, one bad month of excessively irrational market behavior could have wiped him out.)
"He faced skepticism from other big investors. At the same time, fearing imitators, he used software that blocked fund investors from forwarding his emails."

I'm curious as to what software can prevent people from forwarding your emails...
If Dreamhost doesn't refund overdraft fees the chatter on the internet will be very, very bad PR.
Apple is sometimes a bit premature about dropping legacy tech. They eliminated the floppy drive from all their models before USB flash drives were common, for example. The lack of an optical drive is appropriate for a subnotebook, but I've found myself needing wired ethernet quite a bit during the past year.

Of course, there are USB ethernet adapters, but that takes up the only USB port. There are USB hubs, but at that point there's enough random crap to carry around to negate much of the compactness of this machine.
Hypertable: Another open source BigTable clone
There's a lot to like about this computer, but a lot to dislike as well, even for those who favor a minimalist aesthetic.

For example, designing the "Remote Disc" feature was great; telling the world with a straight face that "you can just wireless rent movies from Apple instead of playing DVDs" was just lame.
Kathy Griffin seems to be surviving.
Startup: Collaborative Mind Mapping
CKAN - Comprehensive Knowledge Archive Network
Randy Newman! Jobs' hipness factor just went stratospheric!
A simpler mobile OpenID workflow?
Not to mention the "Integrated Battery." If the batteries are as failure prone as normal batteries, this would worry me. And what about traveling? Is TSA going to take me to a windowless room for not removing my laptop battery? Also, they project a lifetime of 18 months. Kind of low for the price point.

Seems less a practical upgrade and more of a pretty rich kid's toy. Especially when my choices for a hard drive are a $1000 64 GB drive (yeah, yeah SSD. Not worth 1K to me) or an incredibly slow 4200 80 GB drive. Ugh.
Cutting a loss is synonymous with "selling low".
That's a pretty machine, alright. The "aesthetic" factor almost makes me want to preorder one (I really like the look of the mac, even with the aforementioned design flaws). I won't, though, because my 2005 toshiba satellite is still ticking and all my current development tools run without a problem on it, so I can't justify it as a necessity.
You can't buy a financial instrument without driving its price up. This applies even more if you're buying hundreds of millions of dollars worth of a financial instrument.
If Google wants to dominate one or more vertical markets, they have the wherewithal to purchase a promising company that already services said vertical.

That is what I believe is the Achilles' heel of this analysis.
Sandstone: A Drop-In CMS for Existing Rails Applications
Lots of retorts and counter retorts. It read almost like a forum posting.
This is where .Mac's BackToMyMac really shines: http://www.apple.com/dotmac/backtomymac.html

They should have pushed this as well in the keynote. I'll have a MacPro/iMac, or even a MacBook Pro, on my desk and when I need to go to catch a flight, show a keynote presentation, or do some typing somewhere, I'll just grab the Air and walk away. Come back and everything's resynced and backed up on my Time Capsule.

My current system involves juggling my desktop, my dell laptop, and my macbooks, along with like 15 different drives.
Why is there so much interest in reinventing the wheel around here? Many if not most of the examples would be best served by writing a flexible C/C++ library implementation and SWIGging or otherwise hooking them into (Ruby,Lisp,Perl,...)

For example, libSVM already exists as such an implementation. Using LAPACK or something like that for NNMF and writing an easy-to-use hook for Ruby would make more sense than doing it in Ruby. I just don't get the urge to rewrite code in another language without fundamentally improving the situation (obviously 'improvement' is subjective, but I mean here 'make it go faster').

Are there really a ton of sites that are so heavily invested in Ruby that they fail to see its shortcomings in this respect? (As in, it's slow for many types of operations... that's why most scientific libraries are written in C++ or Fortran and then interfaced to a more flexible language or languages) NumPy exists, for example, because Python sucks at manipulating matrices.

I guess I've been an academic for too long at this point, but it seems a little sad to do this unless someone is paying you for the tedium. YMMV.
Cue the Chicken Littles:

"ZOMG! I told you Rails doesn't scale -- back to PHP for me!"
I'm assuming he's doing it primarily for educational purposes.

Even if he weren't, there's nothing wrong with porting libraries to Ruby. There's always an impedance mismatch when you SWIG or otherwise FFI a library into a native application.

Besides, let's be honest -- Python ain't that much faster than Ruby, especially with Rubinius et al on the horizon.
Running Tomato On Your Router
Yes, I have that dell too, and it is powerful and heavy. But, for 1800, you can buy that, and the Asus Eee PC, so you can have them both, one very powerful machine, and one very portable one, for even cheaper than the Mac air.
It's easy to get caught up in the profanity segment of this article, but I don't think that's the main point. I personally am not a fan of profanity in my personal or professional life, so I agree with edw519, but I get the feeling that the gist behind the article was more like "Why focus your energy on things that make you seem professional rather than doing a great job?" It's the difference between going out to get your haircut the morning of a big meeting or sitting in front of your computer burning code trying to put in that last feature you've been thinking about before you have to present. It's tossing ideas around through conversation and prototypes rather than through a monolithic "Business Requirements Document". Perhaps the suggesstion is that a common feature for small businesses that don't do so well is worrying first about the clothes and the office and the letterhead and the large staff, and second about the product.
Not if you're short.
Yeah, but he's right. The future of entertainment doesn't have DVDs in it.

I'm hoping with Apple TV I can skip BluRay alltogether, but I haven't seen the HD specs from the iTunes store yet.
Twitter failed spectacularly during macworld today. Specifically, right during SJ's keynote. Many people are fairly put out about it all.
The integrated battery is a real flaw. 2 years is usually max (if you're lucky) on batteries. What to do then? Hmmm.
Check out point #8 in his list. As the comments suggest, this ones a killer. It took us nearly 8 months and we had to do a few free trials before we got it done finally. It also took weaks just to negotiate all of the contract points.

The upside? 3 year $1mil contract. They are hard but if you get them, the corporate contracts are sweet deals.

The secret is to offer technology and more importanty attentiveness that they just can't get from a more off-the-shelf solution.
The Eee is ugly, slow, and gimpped, so I wouldn't consider that a very good option. Unless all you do is surf the web and check email (and absolutely nothing else).
Communcations of the ACM - 50th Anniversary Issue (Free)
Sigh. "Buying high" then.
I don't think he was 'trading'. Trading in that sense means, approximately, buying because smart people bought, and then selling to stupid people. A 'trader' of the sort Seykota (who was interviewed in, but did not write, Market Wizards -- you're thinking of Schwager) would wait for the ABX to fall, then short, then probably cover once it started to rise again.

Paulson was making a judgment that the market was wrong to price subprimes so high. Do you really think his thought process was "The market is wrong that they're worth X, when they should be at .4X. But if they move to 1.1X, they must be right!" He's thinking like a value guy in a macro trade, not like a 'trader'.
I think this holds great promise for browser users and, by extension, web developers. The closing line of a blog post by Guido came to mind:

http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=4790

"I'm looking forward to Jef's Humane Browser!"

Let's see..
It is quite hard to imagine how he's a 'bad guy'. Housing was too expensive. If you bought a house because of the hype, you overpaid. He sold short, which depressed prices, which means that people who bought after his trade are better off than if he hadn't made it.
Y2K38 Watch Starts Saturday
Why use a laptop in 'desktop' mode at all?
Last time I used a desktop was... well... years ago.
He's short mortgages. That's what you do when you buy a home, too, except you get a home and he just keeps the cash. Paulson is actually one of the world's biggest subprime borrowers -- so however much pity you have for the average borrower, multiply it by about 20,000 or reconsider your assumptions.
Hey, Steve -- you broke the Internet
no, discs, DVDs, blueray, HD-DVD... they are all dead.
My MacBooks superdrive is barely of use anyway since it has stupid region coding on it so I can't play half the DVDs I own.

I think it's great Apple have 'got it' as regards the future. In 5 years people are unlikely to be shoving discs into things.
Perhaps, like me, he has no idea what the following are or mean:
* SWIGging
* libSVM
* LAPACK
* NNMF
Oh boy euclidean distance!
I don't think that most managers are money-stupid at all. I think they rightly recognize in most cases that mediocre is far cheaper than great, and the difference might be worth the savings. If you're a manager of an internal IT department, it doesn't benefit you that much to have a kick-ass coder on your team, not nearly as much as it benefits you in your review to have saved that much money in salaries. jsrfded has the right idea, the only place to find proportionate compensation is in a business where the software is the product.
It's not about fewer lines, it's about fewer layers. If you can abstract out portions of the code with your more powerful language, you can test it independently and know it works, then build on it. The fewer layers you have to hold in your head, the easier the code is to modify and maintain.

Really productive programmers win by writing themselves APIs as they go. These can be reused in the future (hence the productivity multiple grows over time). As PG and others have said multiple times, you can be way more productive if you design a language for the problem domain, then use that language to solve the problem. That is what more powerful languages allow you to do.

It's not so much about trying to condense lines of code, it's about how many things you have to focus on at once (the fewer things you need to pay attention to, the easier it is to work with). Since any modern language handles all the minutiae of disk access for me, I can read and write to files with one or two lines. I don't have to care how it's done.

If you think I'm just stating the obvious, I rewrote a project in my last job in about three weeks that took the original team of four people two months to implement. The only thing that allowed me to achieve that kind of speedup was that I used an existing SOAP library (this was a web app with a web service back end for the data) instead of all the kludgy custom XML parsing they were doing. They had different code on each page of the web app for handling the webservice calls. It may sound retarded (because it is), but I have seen that kind of situation a hundred times, so I have to believe that that is the kind of code the average programmer churns out.

I don't claim to be a rockstar either. I know I've written a ton of horrendous, kludgy, redundant crap in my lifetime too. I think it just happens when you don't have a clear idea of what the end product will be, and don't take the time to refactor as you go.
I'm not sure if this is supposed to be ironic or not, but I got an "Error establishing connection with database" error when I tried loading the page the first time.

It works ok now though.
Thus comes a complementary product, the Airport Express. Normally just a wireless router with an AirTunes doodad, it could be remarketed in this case as the Air's "wireless-to-Ethernet adapter."
Don't get me wrong, I am also curious about the "new" wave of programming languages. But Perl was also dynamic and very brief, and I remember being VERY glad to switch from Perl to Java. Suddenly code worked the way I thought it would work, not some other weird way. That memory sticks with me, and therefore I take the dynamic typing hype with a grain of salt.

Maybe the "Boilerplate" aspect of Java is a bit overblown. There are interfaces, but I think they are a necessity because of static typing (how do Scala and Haskell deal with it?).

So it is really the pros and cons of static and dynamic typing that are to be discussed. There are boilerplate things like the awful EJB stubs, but everybody hated them from the beginning, and I for one managed to avoid using them for all those years. They are not Java, just something stupid somebody implemented with Java. You could also create a horrible framework with lots of boilerplate code for Ruby, after all.

What else? OK, the new generics are too verbose, I hate them, too. And then there are the curly braces and mandatory brackets for function calls, but I think that can't be what everybody hates (Ruby is more verbose with do end instead of brackets, isn't it?).
Blu-Ray, DVDs, and HD-DVD are dead? Not so fast there. :)

As tempting as it is, I won't get baited into that particular discussion. My point was that the idea of eschewing viewing the DVDs I already own in favor of renting from Apple is preposterous. As they say in Propaganda, Jobs was "passing from the acceptable to the dubious" with product placement thinly veiled as cool minimalism.
A very useful idea. Many databases can be such a pain to find, I'm sure most people don't know they exist.

Plus, I've got a ton of python for doing complex manipulations of sql data and schemas and scraping the web that I've been meaning to share. Will add some to this site.
I have a 24'' external display attached to a 2lb notebook. I like my small and lightweight notebook for traveling, but for longer stretches of work I like to have the big screen, too.
VCs and the "No-Pass Pass"
Biggest concern: 2GB RAM.

No configurator option for more, and wording about RAM "onboard" and tight design makes me wonder if more is even possible.
"If Apple thinks the permanent HD, RAM, and battery in the Macbook Air will last long enough to warrant buying the computer in the first place, they should throw in AppleCare . . ."
It has a DVI port...

[edit]: oh gocha.
Just look at what the college down to the first grade kids are doing these days.... disks are dead.
Where the heck are you guys getting the idea that I said that long work weeks are good? Somewhere this discussion got derailed..
It is a fine machine, but very high-end consumer oriented. I use my mac laptops for programming, video editing, and running music applications. I actually DO have multiple batteries, maxed-out ram and use multiple firewire and USB accessories. I was quite disappointed that there were no updates to the "pro" laptop line. Perhaps this market (the "creative mobile professional market") is a loser for apple and they want to get out of that business.

Also, I purchased a MacBook when they first came out, and had numerous problems with the battery and power supply. Thus, the lack of replaceable battery makes me nervous.
OneNote is awesome - sharing documents with yourself and others
Dreamhost made a $7.5 million billing error
I thought LISP is functional, and it lets you change variables. So I don't think that is specific to functional programming.
I know, I was replying to the "why desktop mode" post. But perhaps I misunderstood it.
I hope their data visualization section matures.