skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Some Slashdot-spelunking resulted in a few comments that seemed reasonable:

http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1191575&cid=27502...
The poster makes some odd similes in advancing an argument that the biggest problem is not central computers, but the endpoint devices at substations and such.

http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1191575&cid=27503...
This poster asserts that a drive to create interconnectability has resulted in more open access.

I feel like I have more information, but not much more understanding of the answer to my original question. :-)
"You just insulted an entire race....including myself."

I am suspicious when people pull the "race card" so let me quote the original post (I didn't write it, I am just a bystander)

I quote

"Roughly this is how the society is organized:

1) Arabs - first-class citizens - dumb, don't like to work, but often hold 'mudira'/'manager' positions in companies. They don't have college degrees but they hold senior-level positions in companies and are uber-slackers :)"

Which part are you objecting to? Are you saying that Saudi Arabia (which the OP seems to be talking about) is a race blind meritocracy and the Arabs (a) are not on top by virtue of being Arab (b) they work harder than anyone else (c) most of them have advanced college degrees and/or are more educated than their subordinates (d) they don't hold senior positions or (e) they aren't slackers but are very hard workers? [ which is the same as (b) I guess].

You'd contribute more if you explained which of these many assertions is the "false information" you object to.

The key point the OP seems to make is that there is a very stratified society the strata depending primarily on race and not hard work or educational qualifications and that being an Arab allows you to occupy the highest layer without any other qualifications necessary.

Are you saying this is not true?

My friends who work in the gulf tell me the same thing, so I am curious (and eager) to hear a counter opinion.
Exactly, just look at how the GMail mobile has changed over time. I wonder if that's one of the items on their secret checklist.

That said, GMail is also by far the slowest app of them all, it can take seconds to load. I hope they'll implement some kind of background loading sometime.
From alt.sysadmin.recovery FAQ v1.799999999999999998...
[http://www.faqs.org/faqs/sysadmin-recovery/]

Perhaps Abby Franquemont summarized the life of a sysadmin the best, when she described us as:

"disgruntled, disenchanted with things we used to really get a kick out of,
foul tempered, hard-drinking, heavy-smoking, overworked, with no real social
life to speak of."

Or perhaps she was being optimistic.

I have not had responsibility for the operation of a large computer and communication system since the dinosaur era, but I found the work so repetitive and tedious that it motivated me to go back to college and get an EE degree.

Over a decade of lurking on asr shows that some sysadmins preserve sharp perceptions, wide-ranging interests, and pointed communication skills.
It was a big problem in the JavaScript world, until JQuery and YUI and Google came out and said "Thou shalt not modify Object.prototype" and started leading by example. But Prototype and Mootools and a bunch of smaller libraries still modify the prototypes of built-in objects, which is the main reason I won't go near those libraries. Unfortunate, since they're otherwise pretty good...

I think new versions of JSON.js (json2.js) don't modify Object.prototype anymore - Crockford has certainly learned his lesson.
Putting a Price on Social Connections
Build Your Own Multitouch Surface Computer
Cooperation is dandy if n = 2, but for n > 2, this can get cumbersome. Unfortunately method names like 'sum' are very attractive.

A language/library designer shouldn't have to think of "all of the short or otherwise possibly overloaded nouns and verbs people might like to use, ever." Being able to say you are going to do a 'sum' which means X in this particular context is very powerful.

This notion should also be unified with version control. (As in OS X, where a process only sees the versions of libraries that it is supposed to run against.)
Yeah I'm doing the same 'summer project'. I was writing my own parser/lexer by hand, but vaguely remembered hearing that Parrot had hit 1.0, so figured it'd be a good platform to experiment on. No idea if it'll support everything I want to try, but it at least seems easy to get started.
An Intro to Reverse Induction
Thank you for proof-reading, I edited my post above: I guess I am complaining about implementation of JVM/AIR. Yes, I want my code to run everywhere, but I want to use more lightweight VMs for that, those that blend into native OS more easily, and code sharing between processes is a big part of it, i.e. if I want to be able to write my application as a module which can be shared between 20 processes without being copied around 20 times.

Basically the only parts of VMs I like is the bytecode and garbage collection. JVM/AIR do a lot more than that.
What I care about is not having the line numbers in there. Makes copying-and-pasting a huge pain.
Not that I totally understand it either, but I think he was railing against the JVM in particular, not VMs in general.
Microsoft's search engine way behind Google? Blame the name
The State of PyPy [pycon video]
Yet there's crazyness like Sun renaming Java 1.5 to Java 5, or Python 3 to Python 3000, or Netscape 4.7 to Netscape 6.0. Many of these are explicitly for marketing purposes, because a competitor had a higher version number.

It's moronic to compare version numbers across products precisely because standards vary so widely. I'd say that Django 0.97 was more stable than Rails 2.0, yet it's not even a 1.0!
"Put them on a time clock, dress them in suits, and they become sullen and start sabotaging the product."

So "real" programmers can't dress properly and reject any form of structure? Can we push these trivial stereotypes aside and instead realize that great programmers have a range of personalities? Smart people of all backgrounds, programmers included, rebel against rules that do not make sense. But rejecting rules does not make you a great programmer.
It disgusts me on levels I cannot describe that this is standard operating procedure for ruby modules (gems, etc) and is the main reason I could never use it. Adding and replacing methods on builtin classes? Are these people out of their minds?! I don't understand it. I've used monkey patches once or twice and it always feels really dirty.
But aren't they also commoditizing the infrastructure for scalable social sites? You can read, or watch videos, of their entire approach to the design and architecture of their systems. They are essentially doing the R&D and sharing it with everyone.

Also, they live on the fact that they make it easy for everyone to organize into social groups based on some kind of commonality. Well, what happens if that commonality is fighting against facebook charging for services? Or if people socialize into groups inviting people to move to another social site?
Very cool, but I don't see any way for clients to use oAuth. Requiring users to give me their Twitter passwords seems so last year.
This looks very cool.

How do you (and/or Plura) deal with the problem of running code on other people's machines? How do you know that the data being sent back is valid, or that a competitor can't start a node and reverse-engineer your code? This may be less of an issue than I imagine, but I'm sure it's something you've thought about so I'd be interested in hearing your thoughts.
I agree, and I fear that it is in fact a dying practice.
Chariot: Wearable Personal Transportation Device
I think that the word "morality" (also "ethics") is, to a truly ridiculous extent, not well-defined.

Or rather, people are dreadfully inconsistent about what they call morality. I can give you a definition of ethics, morality is trickier so I may be able to only summarize a few points.

Ethics is a system of determining right action for individuals and groups of individuals from a set of commonly held values. For example: if equity is a value, then preferential treatment becomes a wrong. Ethics works by finding common values and working from them. The fact that value is subjective has no bearing; ethical systems merely look for a common denominator and work from there. Different ethical systems are the product of applying different philosophical methodologies to different values sets.

Morality is very different. It is the object of the assumption that there is a universal set of rules and values to which all human beings must, for some reason or other, assent. What this universal code consists of, isn't necessarily universally accepted, but what is universally accepted, or nearly so, is the assumption that there is a universal code. That a physicalist, or mechanistic account of the universe cannot account for this is evident. That very few human beings actually accept a physicalist or mechanistic worldview, even if they claim to do so, is also evident. It presupposes some kind of telos, or universal purpose.

So what morality is, is this: an objective standard of behavior that is (instinctualy) assumed by everybody, agreed (in total; the vast majority hold a large number of principles in common and differ only on application, hence the need for ethics) upon by few, and can only be fully accounted for by some kind of metaphysics.

Edit: spelling and word usage
Well, I would hope that if you follow the first step (work as an apprentice), it would get you in the habit of requesting code reviews, even when you've entered "the guild."

It's also worth noting that code reviews should be two-way streets--that is, more junior programmers should review more senior programmers' code, even if for nothing more than a learning experience.
I know I've seen code with formatted line numbers in places that still allowed proper c'n'p functionality. I can't think where though.
I'm curious as to how lisp has dealt with this for 40+ years
2000 users - "quite wealthy"?

How much net profit are you assuming you are taking in from these 2000 customers?
I see significantly better results than that using gmail combined with the filter built in to Evolution. Spam almost never gets through. I would estimate that no more than 1 in 200 actual spams get through.

A somewhat higher number of newsletter-type messages from businesses I've bought from in the past show up. Many times, these messages are sent to everyone who orders, with no ability to not opt in when placing an order. I would assume these messages are not counted in that 97% figure.
The central thesis of the article seems to be stated in the first sentence

"The environment that nurtures creative programmers kills management and marketing types--and vice versa"

Are you saying this is not true? I've been trying to think of a company that is an exception to this, but i can't. [EDIT maybe Apple?]

I know that Google managers complain that engineers are taken more seriously in Google then themselves. As for engineers aversion to marketers you are completely on the money about that.
Are you designing (1), or supporting? Whether you are programming, administering, PM-ing, or doing something else, I find the question pertinent.

If you designing, actively creating, you are likely to be engaged. If you are merely supporting others, you are more likely to be neglected and relegated to repetitive tasks as well as "clean up" for others' mistakes.

In good part, I find it a matter of control. If you do admin work, but are allowed to find, create, and implement better ways of doing it, you are likely to be engaged. If someone else is telling you what your environment will be (in minutia), what your tools will be, and basically turning you into a glorified button pusher, you are likely going to suffer. (I base this in part on your presence in this forum. I've met plenty of people who are more than happy to just push the indicated buttons.)

In some of my more engaging work, my technical role was pretty mundane. But it was a tied to a group of people who were having trouble getting their act together. By listening to them and getting them to talk to each other, openly and directly, I changed to process from a morass to a success. Thus my mentioning PM and other work. I find that often it's not (just) what I'm doing, but what kind of control I have. Almost always, I see opportunities for improvement. If I'm allowed to pursue those, I'm happy. (And I do so responsibly, communicating my efforts up the chain of command and documenting things.) If I'm not, well, I'm still learning to get out fast. I've already squandered more than enough time on "the way things are supposed to be".

----

1. not meaning the current tendency to associate "design" with UI design
A strong business plan is most important when investing in start-ups
If you don't see the filenames, then you're looking at an old demo version of BumpTop. You're right that it's pretty important to have ;-)

BumpTop is definitely not for everyone, but that's fine. Not all software has to be designed for your 50 corporate users, because they certainly have different needs than the rest of us. A designer, for example, might really appreciate the visual and spatial aspects of the system, because it's more meaningful than a bunch of PSDs named icon-concept1, icon-concept2, etc.

Also, although the 3D and physics is the most noticeable thing about BumpTop, it's actually got quite a few very useful features that are completely orthogonal to the 3D/physical aspect. For example: type to find on filenames, thumbnails of several different document formats, seamless photo browsing, and icons that grow or shrink based on your usage of a document.
Shelves for Life: From Bookshelf to Coffin
I'm an admin, and certainly can relate to what Abby says. However, I can also code in half a dozen languages, and often fix things with a few lines of expect and shell, where our enterprise java cowboys would demand a new server with a java app server and still can't do a complete job of it.
Being a sysadmin was fun in the early 20's. Now getting close to 30, I get high on Scala, the finer points of TCL etc. I do worry about the future though.
I was under the impression that a work around had been found for that but as I'm unable to find a tutorial or any discussion I could have imagined it.

Having to strip the line numbers out is a real pain. I agree totally with you on that. However, as the presence of line numbers is normally configurable in the highlighting plugins I still see nothing new here.
"

"Put them on a time clock, dress them in suits, and they become sullen and start sabotaging the product."

So "real" programmers can't dress properly ..."

Just curious but how did you equate "dress in suits" to "dress properly"? I've never been able to see the relevance of programmers wearing suits.
However you don't like convention when it comes to what 1.0 means?
So "real" programmers can't dress properly and reject any form of structure?

'Can't' is a strong word, but pretty much.

It's not just a programmer thing. People who are good at anything reject arbitrary structure. If your power is your talent, an organization which assigns power based on anything else is an obstacle for you. Nevertheless, such people can be happy with structure, if it elevates people they consider to be smarter or more capable than they are.

I don't think it's unique to programmers. The only reason why this phenomenon is so pronounced in our world is that we have greater than 10:1 productivity ratios among programmers.

By the way, not following the herd doesn't mean you're just undisciplined. One of the better programmers I've known wore only t-shirts and rarely even wore shoes in the office, and was considered half-impossible to deal with. But, he was actually more aware than the rest of us about how the whole organization ran, politically, and when he did make concessions, his managers felt like they had succeeded. Of course, you have to be insanely productive to get away with this, so it's not for everyone.
Story about spies penetrating grid may be part of a PR campaign
"This requires getting all of the framework, gem, and plug-in authors everywhere to agree on standards for everything."

Let me flesh it out a little bit more.

I'm not suggesting there be a canon. I'm thinking of the way github does gems, where the gems are all namespaced with a username. There could be 20 versions of array#sum, but the one that the pioneers/influencers/cool-kids-who-write-frameworks decide to use is the one that gets used. If someone decides to go their own way, someone else will fork and fix.

Maybe conflicts could be detected at the gem level via gems exposing the names of the monkey patched methods they contain.

Honestly I think git/github fundamentally changes some things and that we as a culture haven't yet fully adapted our thinking to the new possibilities.

Of course there will always be problems, and maybe this is utopian crazy talk, but the natural "that can't possibly work" reaction might be worth questioning.

EDIT:

Allow me to go from just crazy to total nutter: a language market where the commodity is semantics and the currency is popularity. If it were given influence over language design would it be an improvement over the benevolent dictators (Larry/Matz/Guido) or an epic fail?
Sales at Wholesalers Rise
I find it hard to believe that sharing libraries in memory makes a significant difference. Most libraries are small relative to RAM sizes. The only exception is on cell phones, which only run a few processes anyway.
Couldn't agree more, with what you quoted.
I hadn't seen this feature, that does sound quite cool. Thanks for calling it out.
"You can get locked into a cloud."

That's a funny thing to be concerned about with respect to technology. It's like the old arguments, "Don't buy the computer because it'll be cheaper next year."
It's no mystery how facebook is going to monetize their users -- by advertising. It's what they've been doing since a few months after their launch.

There was an interview with marc andreessen a couple months ago, and he plainly said that facebook could become a billion dollar company if it turned on aggressive advertising. But it's trying to figure out the most effective way to advertise without alienating users.
Customer evolution and google adwords the wave is gone
Which is even easier in Ruby 1.9

[1,2,3].inject(:+)
This is a problem with OAuth. Tokens aren't transferable like passwords.

We're going to make a work-around, and it should be live within a week.
http://groups.google.com/group/twitter-development-talk/msg/...

From there:

No need to keep it a secret: we plan on allowing for a
authorization_url param that is an OAuth signed call to
http://twitter.com/account/verify_credentials.json

We'd verify the call with Twitter, then proceed like we have a twitter
password.

This call won't work though, because we'd need to update the user's
status
http://tipjoy.com/api/#creating_twitter_payment

We'll enable a work-around by posting the tweet, and calling that
endpoint with an id of a tweet already posted.
Google CEO Eric Schmidt: Good or Just Lucky?
By getting a reputation of being poorly suited to team development, unfortunately.
I can believe that.

It's evident in how people work. Google got a few things right :

- Got the users early : Just a simple textbox opening up the doors to the world wide web was what got people using it (as compared to others like altavista with heavy pages that took a while to load .. and load times were (and still are) very important.

- Kept the users : Given how humans work, once people get used to using something, they would go to great lengths to avoid changing. In the same vein, once I get used to using Google and getting what I need, it will take a lot of effort to make me switch because frankly, I don't need to because switching would take me out of my comfort zone and involve changing myself.

- Scaled : Peer pressure / Word of mouth is a strong thing. As more and more people use Google and like it, they tell others about it. Imagine hearing that Google is the best from a bunch of trusted computer-savvy friends/relatives than seeing a commercial saying Live search is better. Who are you likely to trust ?
Why the Nazis did what they did. (book review)
This is a disaster if the senior programmers are less skilled than the junior programmers. It happens a lot in big corporations. "You have more than one return statement! Go change that."

Of course if you work in a shop like that, it's advisable to leave. And I did.
No way to fast forward. :(
The difference between us is this: You see something that sickens you and publicly blame and shame others for the mess. I see something sickening and I am trying to clean it up.
And EC2 has support for everything.
I used to work where I would get skewered for misplacing the ; or about the formatting of my comments. After surviving that, I think I can survive anywhere.
Why are these things on a public net in the first place? (Other than the detail that it's probably cheaper to do it that way.) The control systems of vital infrastructure should be on their own network, with authentication through public key cryptography.
If you are going to be at Stanford today, you can also attend Jensen Huang's talk at 4:30 PM. He is the cofounder and CEO of NVIDIA.

http://etl.stanford.edu/
Stripping the line numbers is not that difficult. In emacs, position the point at the beginning of the document, then hit M-> to go to the end, then move the point to the first non-line-number character, then hit C-x r k.

Problem solved.
It's the shiny new toy every new ruby dev wants to play with. Once they get bit in the butt by some really obscure bug that requires the correct combination of 10 gems to reproduce they'll realize that maybe monkeypatching isn't such a hot idea, until then we'll have a bazillion versions of String.
Didn't Warhol say something about this once? (15 minutes...)
I was recently researching DVD replication. I haven't ordered anything yet, but from a price perspective these two looked good. Both offer custom printing on the disk.

http://www.newcyberian.com
http://www.nationwidedisc.com/
BackType Launches Wordpress Plugin to Connect Conversations
While I often seem to be in the role of firefighter, it is one I despise. The more the firefighter saves the day, the more people play with matches in the gasoline refinery.
Very interesting, could it go into a mine? I mean could the miners be safely above ground while the bots are in the actual mine. Or how about in deep water? I know there's a lot of very dangerous and important work for divers around oil platforms. Could that bot be use there?

Alternatively, what kind of autonomous functionality does it have?

A friend of mine broke is foot and we were both at party with him hoping around on crutches. He couldn't stand with his crutches and hold his drink at the same time. So my friends and I took turns being his butlers. We joked around that if we were stinking rich we could get a robot to follow my friend around at a short distance and hold his drink on a tray at just the right height the whole night.

This idea however probably doesn't have a very large market.
The plugin works with Hacker News comments too - this conversation will be mirrored on our blog

More info:
http://www.backtype.com/plugins/connect
Sales Advice Wanted
Any tips on how to train yourself to become a kickass sales man? What about how to find the right coach, the right training?
Monty, what a name for a robot, especially when it was programmed in Python.
i agree, i learn a lot from tweaking, rewriting, debugging and adapting source codes to my projects; however, reinventing the wheel (w/o seeing others' solutions) actually pushes me harder
WSJ Promises New Pay Sites, Some Day
Damn it, I can feel my bank account losing $1000 dollars as I type.
This is misleading. It's based on the earliest business plan they were able to find, but that probably dates from the series A round.