skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This guy needs to take a good step back and gain some perspective. He may be entirely right about these people (although he's the only one I've ever heard say that Dave Thomas is anything but a super-nice guy).

Being right is not the same thing as doing the right thing. Right now he looks every bit as ugly as the people he's vilifying. That's a shame.
Try it now. It should be much more iPhone-palatable.
I generally agree with you here.

I also think that undergraduate CS degrees today, are diluted. That's not to say I have not met folks who know what they are doing with their CS degree. They are also the ones paying attention in class. For those that don't really know how to program ... they got about as much skill as a non-techie who goes off to try to do their own thing.

With regards to the English major. It was very possible that he programmed computer as a kid, tried to get a CS degree, and failing that dropped back to English. I'm not saying that this is what happened to him. I do know of a few folks at the local university it happened to. So far, they have not tried to get a programming job.
Put it in context:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=91814

I'm surprised the business even survived that long with that many restarts per day.
I agree.

Just to clarify, though, the point I was trying to make was not about the importance of degrees but about the importance of learning computer science rather than just, for example, "learning to code Rails" (whatever that means).
Google celebrates the new year, and 25 years of TCP/IP
DHH: Don't overestimate the power of versions
I am indian, and though I have spent only a small portion of my life in India, I think there are several reasons "why they are not taking over the world". [Disclaimer - I too am an H1-B holder]

1. India is a country of over 1.3 billion people, and about half are illiterate. So, yes, there are many engineers clamoring, but the number relatively is not as high as it should be.

2. There is a fairly high degree of corruption, which in this case is the result of a lot of red-tape. Getting anything done means having the resources and or money or both to get anything done, which kills many enterprising ideas

3. The high population results in the infrastructure bursting at its seams, and often most places other than the big cities to be lacking. This makes places like the US seem extremely attractive alternatives. A lot of the people who graduate from the IITs (Indian Institute of technology), and many engineering school (almost all my friends) are abroad.

There are several other reasons but I hope this puts it in perspective. Though these days (from what I hear, I haven't been back in some time) times are a-changing. I hear a lot more about the startup scene in India, and with the influence of big corporations like Google, the government seeing that India has the potential to be a technical center in the world, the growth of indian firms like Wipro and infosys, the Ambani and Ispat group maybe this can be avoided.

Hope this puts some of this in perspective.
I'm surprised more people don't listen to NPR. NPR is my main news source I compliment that with the economist, news.yc, and reddit, though less so lately. Frontline from pbs whenever they have a new one out.

Podcasts:
Highlights from PBS: The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer
on the media
apm: marketplace
NPR: it's all politics
talk of the nation science friday
Are you ready to stake everything on your idea?

Saying you're willing to "stake everything" stops you from doing the thinking needed to get an honest and accurate assessment of your risk.
Just tried your site with Opera

Version 9.50 Beta
Build 4506
Platform MacOS X
System 10.5.1

The search wouldn't work at all. Then I enabled JavaScript and it seemed to work better. If you need JavaScript, you should advertise that fact. By default I only enable JavaScript for selected sites.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/f/f8/Internet_dog.j...
&#26032;&#24180;&#24555;&#20048;&#12290;
You could consider invoicing via Amazon FPS or YC's own TextPayMe ( https://textpayme.amazon.com/sdui/sdui/index.htm )
Voorspodige nuwe jaar. (Afrikaans)
Good point about Apple and OS innovation.

Wasn't Apple the company that had nearly a decade of abandoned "next generation" operating systems (Pink, StarTrek, Raptor, NuKernel, TalOS, Copland, Gershwin) before finally buying NeXT (based on open-source Mach from CMU) and later establishing a cooperative coexistence with FreeBSD.
"Their purpose is to make it harder to do bad things. Making it easier to do good things is not a requirement."

That seems like a pretty silly set of expectations for a framework. By virtue of making it easier to do things, you may eliminate a lot of bad things, but the goal really is to make it easier to do things. This might seem like splitting hairs, but you split the hair here, and I disagree with the conclusion.
Zed was right about the http://example.com/posts/1;edit thing. It stunk the first time I saw it. I think that DHH admitted it was a bad idea in his RailsConf keynote, but I'm not sure if I remember correctly.

But the point is that just because it was a bad idea, doesn't mean Koz is categorically a bad developer, or that he's any of the things that Zed called him. I heard him talk at RailsConf, and I have to admit that he sounded kind of like an egotist, but didn't actually know how to code all that well. But do I call him a fat fucker? No. That's taking it a little too far.
Yahoo has business problems, not technical ones.

Do they even need this guy? He is a performance specialist.
Did you see at the bottom where he says Dave Thomas' Pickaxe book killed Ruby? I gotta see that.
Praying to the Visa God is actually quite a bit more rational than current US immigration policy.

I think pmarca should stick to giant block quotations from the WSJ and other voice-of-the-elite rags, and away from attempts at wit. As for the Visa God worshippers, Ted Kennedy said this,

"The bill will not flood our cities with immigrants. It will not upset the ethnic mix of our society. It will not relax the standards of admission. It will not cause American workers to lose their jobs." (U.S. Senate, Subcommittee on Immigration and Naturalization of the Committee on the Judiciary, Washington, D.C., Feb. 10, 1965. pp. 1-3.)

He might have added: It will not cause a rush of mentally touched Pagans into our high technology sectors.
There's also svk from BestPractical (better known for RT).

http://svk.bestpractical.com/view/HomePage
This is a pretty big loss to Yahoo. Steve's an amazing engineer and he led the performance team at Yahoo. He just released an excellent book on performance as well. He invented a ton of techniques on how to optimize the front and back-end performance of web apps. His team also created YSlow and they're actively supporting/working on Firebug.

Yahoo has released so much useful stuff and Steve and his team have been extremely generous. I hope this continues as he moves to Google.
Xin nian kuai le.

Pronounced: Sxeen neeyan kooai luh.
Gotcha.

You're right, learning computer science is important to developing software.
The Man who wants control on the Internet
I never met Koz or interacted with him in any significant way, so I don't really have an opinion about him.

I've never met Zed. However, from the rant and from reading the interview with Zed about Mongrel a couple years back, I think Zed is being true to himself. To me, that's more important than crossing socially sanctioned lines ... even if it is name-calling.

I also know that I'm in the minority here. I value self-honesty more than appearances of professionalism or maturity. Self-honesty is extremely difficult to accomplish, if you can accomplish it at all. I get the sense that Zed prizes this as well. Won't really know unless I've met him.
Au contraire, the very fact that the programming benchmark site neither rewards or punishes conciseness makes it a good place to see how important it is to the average programmer when also dealing with an explicit performance criteria.

Also, I think your statement that conciseness is inversely proportional to speed is rarely true. It certainly doesn't hold for the programming examples at the shootout site.
But if his talent was going to waste at Yahoo, isn't it better for everyone that he's somewhere that can use him?
Siht Sia-ekaf Egaugnal! (Latvian)
I think that sometime in the future (<50 years perhaps?), advancements in cosmetic surgery will come to a level of sophistication and low cost where practically everyone in rich countries can look anyway they want. Like second life.

Perhaps by that stage, the cultural stigmas associated with augmenting appearances will have weakened sufficiently so that everyone does it. At which point people will be judged on merit/personality instead of looks. A world where everyone can look the same... Utopia or dystopia?
I would rather take advice on startups from someone who actually built a successful startup. The art of talking about something, however persuasively, is not the same thing as the art of doing it.
You could just license a 3d game engine (or use an open source engine) and create a stunning game that would have been unthinkable a few years ago.

The improvements in game technology have been more visibly stunning but there is plenty going in in the web space. Think about what Virtualization technology is doing vis-a-vis deployment effort. Imagine someone running a "server-less" company even a few years ago. Now lots of companies are doing this with Amazon.
Gelukkig Nieuwjaar! (Dutch)
Ask news.yc: Name your startups of the year
anywhere, songza and few more i need to think for a minute and come back
I suspect that in a world where people can have their appearances overhauled, people will display their wealth by getting expensive body-modifications.
"These Internet engineers weren't control theorists, but they built this incredibly robust network," Doyle says. "Man, that's awesome." Then again, the engineers were doing something that evolution figured out long ago.

I know the intended audience for this article is probably elementary school students, but it always disappoints me when someone says biological evolution "figures out" something, and I'm equally disappointed when someone says it's "awesome" that engineers can do something.

I guess I shouldn't expect much from a magazine that publishes puff pieces like "Long Live Closed-Source Software" http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=93716
I don't think the best tools of today are much better than the best tools of 1995[0], but more people have access to good tools now. I suspect Hunchentoot and CL-WHO aren't substantially better than the set of tools used to write Viaweb. Both are light-years ahead of CGI scripts.

[0] Obviously, we can make richer interfaces today, but that often means more work, so I wouldn't say it makes development easier.
I want to see this "service" get sued for being party to fraud.
The irony, if you can call it that, is that only in the Rails community could someone make a name for themselves by writing a web server in Ruby.
The brave new world of 2008
To the extent that beauty's advantage is a "cultural stigma" that's all well and good, but the point of the article is that beauty is a somewhat credible measure of other qualities, like health and intelligence. When people get plastic surgery, they're gaming other people's sexual instincts and so rendering them invalid.

Cosmetic surgery gives you "beauty" in the same way that processed sugar gives you "nutrition"...that is, it doesn't. Eventually, people will evolve some other antennae that can't be corrupted so easily.
ff3 beta2 is rock solid on the mac!
Weird. I was just in the middle of watching lecture 3 of Strang's course.
I don't think there has been much improvement since the Objective-C version of WebObjects.
How other people can kill your web server: no fun and little profit
It appears that Apache, nginx and Perlbal are all fairly trivial for a single client to take down or make inaccessible. Suggestions?
I think you are confusing sys admins with network engineers.
Mwaka mpya wenye furaha.(Kiswahili)
Happy New Year (English)
;)
You are kidding arent you? (classic trolling)
xkcd - Ghost
I guess I better rethink my general-purpose search engine idea: loogleg.com
Innovation is often understood to mean one of two different things -- pushing boundaries and changing the world, and filling a niche that no one else is filling. They are different things. I'm sad to say it, but I think the first kind is often rooted in dreamy hubris, and thus fails; while the second one -- which is all about a willingness to serve -- does not appeal to the pride of entrepreneurs and will always be in demand in consequence.

The pace of innovation in computing will never again match that of the sixties or seventies -- lots of stuff has been built, has proven its value and been recorded in the Book of Wisdom. Whenever you think, "I know, let's build a such-and-such...", nowadays, you can be pretty sure it's been done at least half a dozen times. We really should emphasize looking back, to learn from history -- now that there is some.

As far as I can tell, the only computing field that does a good job of that is system administration -- experience, mentors and an appreciation for the "old ways" make up an integral part of that discipline.
Some of us just keep our logs. If you keep the same computer for awhile, and leave the default logging on...
Edge 2008 Question
Edge 2008 Question
And we all know how long "eventually" takes. Millennia
> I value self-honesty more than appearances of professionalism or maturity. Self-honesty is extremely difficult to accomplish, if you can accomplish it at all.

Sure, but aren't these things orthogonal? Basic professionalism and maturity need not be excluded because of self-honesty.
Dial-Tone Phreak-RIP
Yeah, I've been wondering about Richard Stallman lately too. His searing experience was seeing the LISP world going commercial and closed... why did he choose to copy Unix instead? Was it just to piggyback on Unix's incumbency? That wasn't so strong at the time anyway. I should re-read Steven Levy's book "Hackers", the answer is probably in there.
Verint Wins 2007 MASS TRANSIT SECURITY COMPANY OF THE YEAR
Robert Wint, Marketing Director of Verint Systems, was recently on hand to receive an award from Frost & Sullivan recognizing his organization success as the 2007 Mass Transit Security Company of the Year for the European Market. Verint was selected as this year's winner based on the strength of its Nextiva Transit portfolio, its regional market success and its sharp focus on customer needs and requirements.
The "English major" Zed mentioned is a friend and co-worker of mine. Zed and him has had some beef going way back.

Kevin is no script kiddy, I can guarantee you that. His 20% time project at Powerset is contributing to Rubinius. I don't know how many people here are hacking on the next generation of Ruby VMs, but I wouldn't call him a script kiddy.
I have gotten help from zed a number of times, as an early adopter of rails and mongrel. He's always been professional, extremely helpful and courteous.

I respect his contribution to rails (I am using at least 18 mongrels as we speak) and I hope the rails community will be better because of this incident.
Incredible stuff, but I can't get out of my head the fact that that guy looks like he should be selling me a Muscle Boy Tom[0] instead of telling me how mah internets should work.

[0] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aRRg9Llx32w
It's the fact that they built a network that's incredibly robust from a control-theoretical standpoint _without the benefit of control theory_ that's awesome.
If you look at the software that people actually use to do things -- compose music, design an airplane, edit a video, design a logo, lay out a brochure, etc., virtually anything besides computer programming -- the best-of-breed tools are proprietary and exist only on proprietary platforms (typically Windows or Mac).

This is because to just about everybody except computer programmers, the interface is the application, and considerable time and money have been invested in things which are more important than beautiful code -- things like usability, "looking pretty", and functioning in a way that mirrors how the intended audience things. This is something that programmers are notoriously poor at; for example programmers-who-are-also-musicians are likely to come up with music tools that make sense to them but utterly baffle nonprogrammer musicians. (Think Csound, Rosegarden, etc.)

Things like AutoCAD are innovative not because they contain fancy new algorithms but because they enable large chunks of the population to do things that they couldn't do before. And AutoCAD is proprietary, expensive, and runs only on Microsoft Windows.

In short, it's looking more and more like proprietary software is what has brought us real freedom.
A running joke between me and a friend of mine is "signals on wires!" referring to Jaron Lanier's criticism that all software is brittle because it operates on the "metaphor" of a signal traveling down a wire, instead of his preferred metaphor of interacting surfaces or something.

Like a nerd-issue Naomi Klein, he's acting as if metaphors are valid criteria on which to assess the technical merits of software. It's really quite ridiculous and indicative of being a bit too fond of the wacky tobacky.
It took me 30 seconds to determine that this guy should be put on the ignore/avoid list.

I have seen his type before. There basic line is, "I am the best, everyone else is either stupid or recognizes how great I am. Are you stupid?"

Even if these types have talent, they fail to accept it in others, and thus they are very difficult to deal with. They can become better once they go through the school of hard knocks. And I thinks that this Zeb guy (was that his name?) is about to get some knocks. Maybe he will learn some humility... maybe not. Eventually he will learn, but it might take him 30 more years of pain.
They don't necessarily need to be excluded. Sometimes they are. In the Mongrel interview, it seems to me Zed has always been an in-your-face kind of a guy. Like I said though, I won't really know unless I talk with him face to face. Words are OK, but words make it easy to obfuscate any truths about yourself.

He threw a tantrum in this rant, no bones about it. But I'm not going to make a judgment on whether he was justified or not. Zed just is, this is the choice he made, these are his actions, and there will be ripples from his actions. So be it.
Didn't say he was a script kiddy. I'm glad that there are people who will stick up for him.
AI on the Web
DHH was referring to individual unix webserver process restarts, not server reboots.
I'm not calling the dude a script kiddie either. I was pointing out the more general pattern of the sentiments Zed has shown in his posts.

Kevin's obviously done a lot of useful work for the Ruby and Rails communities and I respect him on that basis the same way I respect Zed for his open source contributions.
Sure, but either way, it's your app server process going down. Not useful.
Ruby's AI Libraries
Really inspiring post to read at the start of the new year.
The hobbyists part 3 : Dazzled by success - a call for sanity!
where does songza get the songs from?
Web Playgrounds of the Very Young
No that's not useful, but the information coming out of Zed is also not very useful. We don't even know whether the number 400 was meant to be accurate or rethorical. We don't know whether this was going on for a day, a week or a year. His rant was basically an insider thing and there's no way for anyone to judge anything from the outside, which is why I probably shouldn't even be writing these words about it...
How to move from London to S.Valley to develop a startup?
Mac owners 3x more likely than PC owners to have recently paid for a music download
I know, but there isn't another way to wish a happy new year in Spanish... What was I going to say, "Felicidades"? It's a pity I couldn't use the enie.
Computer glitch interrupts Seattle fireworks
Refactoring Motivations
A High-tech Entrepreneur's Guide to Surviving Technical Due Diligence - The Abstract Truth
A nice reminder of something we all know but rarely live.
Blessings be upon you, pius. You have saved me a lot of time with this one.
He used to be a big deal when Virtual Reality was a big deal. Nowadays, I guess he writes articles where he name-drops. Having said that, I enjoyed reading his article.
I thought the thing that pushed Stallman into open source nirvana was that he couldn't get code to printer drivers to make the printers work in his lab.
Another parallel: Willful ignorance of evolutionary theory is to conservatives as willful ignorance of economics is to liberals. (Liberals in the American sense.)

Pushing it a bit further, Keynesian economics corresponds to Intelligent Design in the above parallel.
From his site:

"If you haven't noticed, I'm funny and enjoy having fun. Enjoy my site, tell me if you use my projects. Don't take it too seriously though, it's all an act."

OK at least this guy probably has the ability of self-parity. It's just that I was first turned off by his seeming arrogance. But now that I look more closely, yes he is probably being picked at by the vultures...
Dopplr, Fire Eagle (does Fire Eagle count as a startup?) and Tumblr
definitely tumblr
i think youtube.
2007 in Review: The Best and Worst in Business and Entrepreneurship
This is a great analogy, one which I've been making for a while.

18 months ago, I wrote a blog article about how the war on terror can be thought of as an economic war, where economic transactions either encourage or discourage the individual from using violence.

http://www.whattofix.com/blog/archives/2006/08/goodbye_4gw_h...

This also plays into some of the concepts that Wolfram has been going on about. What is the smallest set of rules that create all of those SKUs and prosperity? Is there a similar set of rules running the universe? (Assuming the Computational Universe theory is correct) Good stuff.
But how to spend the effort effectively is a more interesting question, I think?
I thought this was more concise as a T-shirt:

http://www.offworlddesigns.com/pc-291-24-fools-i-will-destro...

My apologies for the product placement.

And I gotta say: during the course of Zed Shaw's extensive business training, did they never have a class called "What Not To Do When You Burn Out, Part I: Cussing Out Your Former Colleagues on the Open Internet?" Because, if not, I think the b-schools owe him his money back.
Amazon Raises the Cloud Platform Bar Again With DevPay
Redeye VC: Some thoughts on pricing...
Indeed. With disk space cheap, there's no reason not to log everything on your personal machine(s). I have many years of mail and IM logs, not because I intend to use them against anyone, but just because it's so easy to keep them, and I might need to know something in there one day.
One Secret of Success: If You Quit, You Die
5 Worst Websites of the year
"Being expected to kill yourself if you decide to quit is a pretty good motivating factor to keep going even at the lowest points."

I would think so.
50 Best Websites 2007 - TIME
11 Top New Web Apps of 2007
Would you hire him?
Some changes in the formatting of comments
Best of 2007: Trends That Shaped the Web
Sturgeon's Law applies to people. This must be accepted and dealt with. Choose between dictatorship (omnipotent, zealous editors) or ease of compartmentalization (a la Usenet.)
My nomination: Time.com, for making us click on four "next" links to see a list of 5 sites.
DHH? This guy who restarts his web server 400 times a day?
The Best Product Design Of 2007
Frohes neues Jahr! (german)
Reminds me of the adage: Success is when preparation meets opportunity.
In any mid-size to large programming company, very very few of its engineers will know anything about web performance. They don't teach it in school and (until now) you couldn't learn this stuff from a book.