skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Just some information about the legality of marijuana in The Netherlands. I know very little about this, but the knowledge I have by virtue of living there and the discussions that are going on about it is probably more than that of some other people here.

Basically, Steve is right: shit's not easy.

Also, it's not legal here. What actually happens is that the laws regarding possessing pot aren't enforced when you have less than a few grams. You can smoke it on the streets and in your home. It may offend or annoy some people when you do it on the streets, but it's generally accepted. I'm not sure what would happen if you "walk into a restaurant, roll a joint and start puffin' away", I've never seen it happen, but I suppose you would be asked to put it out. (Like you would be if you were smoking tobacco.)

There are shops - we call them "coffee shops", an interesting story of euphemisms - where you can buy some pot. Not too much. And you have to show some ID and be older than 18 years. (Beer and wine, by comparison, can be legally bought at age 16. Spirits are also available from age 18.) These shops are checked quite well and will be closed when there's even a minor thing "off".

Now, here comes the interesting part. They're allowed to buy and sell, but there's no one that can legally sell to them. It's illegal to import the stuff and it's illegal to grow more than a few plants. There are crackdowns on pot growers. It's an interesting case of double-think that leads to some minor discussions.

A big issue is international pressure, mostly from Belgium. Border municipalities on our side of the border do have pot bars and drug tourism happens. This actually attracts a lot of criminals on both sides of the border. In Belgium people going to The Netherlands are stopped by drug "salesmen" looking to make a sale.

These border municipalities also have a lot of hindrance from the drug tourists who generally cause a lot of disturbances of the peace.

International treaties (ranked above the constitution in the hierarchy of law here) prohibit most of the inconsistencies to be solved and gives other countries a bit of a bat to hit us with. The whole issue is pretty fragile here. The current largest party is slowly moving it's position to oppose the current policy of "tolerating" soft drugs. At present, it's unlikely that they'll get a majority in parliament. I don't think it will become illegal again anytime soon, but there will probably be additional restrictions on the use and sale of marijuana. As for the long-term future, I don't know what it will bring. Currently the country is getting more conservative every day, but there's also a bit of a backlash growing.

So, yeah, Shit's NOT Easy.
What if Oracle bought Sun Microsystems?
Do bananas need airbags? And other hastily thrown together concepts for scary sounding headlines.
They have released a library (can be used by premium users): http://www.spotify.com/blog/archives/2009/04/07/spotify-open...
Practical Recursive Combinators (Algorithm design patterns as programming abstractions)
1. Write a list of the things you need to do. Be detailed. The more detail, the better.

2. Estimate how long you think each will take, knowing it always takes longer than you think.

3. Realize it always takes longer than you think, and revise your list.

4. Double everything.

5. Round up.

6. Add it all up, walk to towards your bosses office and/or call the client.

7. In a last second panic realization that it always takes longer than you think, double it again.

In all seriousness, you will get better over time, namely after you do this many times. The only "secret" to the process is write down a detailed list of the things that must get done. Alot of people tend to clump up alot of the endgame details as "polishing" and that results in the 90/10 rule taking full effect (that the last 10% of the work takes 90% of the time) because things like UI testing, inserting the logo, doing the install script, etc, etc, take forever and a day.
I'll note that Greg Bear's Blood Music story (complete with 'grey goo' scenario) was published in 1983 (June issue of Analog SF magazine, edited by Stanley Schmidt), three years before Drexler's book was printed.

By another name, the 'grey goo' trope is older - if you dig into mid-20C comics (especially the horror subgenre), or even older SF, you'll find more than a few examples of the 'mass of protoplasm' that absorbs all organic life into itself.
Probably, but then they should change the "or skip ahead (at least 3 minutes)." to "or go to the third movie and jump in on 25 minutes"
The X reasons you should be doing Y
Thank you. That was funny.
Could you explain this:

"Granted selling [products] to other companies seems to be what large organizations do when they die"

I couldn't disagree more. Could you please elaborate?
a) The figure would be 0.022 pence under the current contract, and 0.22 pence under the legally-mandated minimum per-play charge, not 22 pence.
b) The argument that Google gives him free publicity depends crucially on the assumption that a viewer will go to iTunes and buy either a video or a single after viewing the video. But, and numerous consumer behaviour studies have borne this out, this is in fact not the case. And the reason why is obvious: what's the point of going to iTunes and paying for the video when you can watch it any number of times in YouTube? YouTube replaces demand for the video, it doesn't enhance it. Even if you don't accept the conclusion of the consumer behaviour studies (and it's true that there are a few studies which contradict those findings), the idea that YouTube promotes sales doesn't tally with industry revenues over the last two years in which YouTube's hits for music videos have exploded -- the music industry has seen online growth of, IIRC, 17% or so, but that has been more than offset by decline in CD sales of around 20%. So all in all, people are buying less music. If YouTube is such an excellent vehicle for publicity, where are the resultant increased sales? Over time, this argument becomes increasingly untenable.
And, if you harbor doubts about Bill Gates' technical ability:

My First BillG Review by Joel Spolsky

"He was flipping through the spec! [Calm down, what are you a little girl?]

... and THERE WERE NOTES IN ALL THE MARGINS. ON EVERY PAGE OF THE SPEC. HE HAD READ THE WHOLE GODDAMNED THING AND WRITTEN NOTES IN THE MARGINS.

He Read The Whole Thing! [OMG SQUEEE!]

The questions got harder and more detailed."

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/06/16.html

There is a nice little koan about technical management in that essay too: "he just wants to make sure .."

* Note - submitted this last night but should have put it in the original comment - my submissions auto-bury themselves.
I concur. Yesterday I spent an hour building a dropdown menu for a client that rendered correctly in Safari 2+, Firefox 2+ and Opera. Then I spent two-and-a-half more hours getting it to render correctly in IE6 and 7, rendering my page invalid in the process. Ick.
Listening to the Dot-Comments
Properly, but unlike the rest of the rich startups can leave the country, setup their servers in another country and their customers would never know the difference.
I'm using Java on xp-dev.com. I did run through a bunch of frameworks (Spring webflow, Wicket, Struts), and just decided to rollout a home grown one.

See, I'm still two minded and really really undecided whether Java is a good or bad programming language. One mind says Java is verbose and does not support nice things like closures (there are anonymous classes, but it's still not pristine) and then the other mind says, but but.. look at the IDE support - in a bunch of keystrokes you end up with loads of code, and you can refactor nicely and whatnot
Is there an explanation anywhere about what the different aspects of the visualization represent? (colors, for instance)
Is the Wall St. Journal becoming the new Fox News? Seriously, there is a strong trend of articles against Silicon Valley and provoking animosity with the Democrats.

This opinion article has plenty of half-truths and fallacies. Don't let them play you.
I think it's referring to an email quote in the article.
Under "all press is good press", I note that whatever their sins, getsatisfaction.com has achieved name recognition. I doubt that any other startup posting "Help us design a web page" post would rise to the top of the front page in 20 minutes...
His part of the payment buckets has a clear definition problem. He is making a hard system instead of a soft system. A soft system solution could be on the customer side, perhaps some JavaScript add-on warning on bucket watermark levels.

I have more respect for The Average Reddit Commenter than I have for, well, the average
commenter in any other forum, period, assuming that "period" is stevey-legalese
for "except for LTU, news.ycombinator and their ilk, mumble mumble."

Lately, it getting more and more like that :-/
Declaring something dead is just the most readily available form of criticizing. Being critcal makes you appear competent without too much effort. And if you cannot follow the critizing person's judgement he/she can still look down on you and pretend to have just higher standards. It's a well-known trick in the corp world, and I have seen it described in books as well. That's why doers are weak in bigger companies, because most things you do are easily attackable, in their early feeble stages. And you just deliver something others can be critical to boost themselves.
The recent post by Daniel Tanner on how to be relentlessly resourceful, and Joel's long favoured essay on "smart and gets things done" seems fine when resourceful means "smile and make a couple of phonecalls", but it fails somewhere on the gradient up to where this post discusses changes at Amazon. Steve Yegge seems both 'smart' and 'gets things done', yet he wrote this post on how difficult changes can be, and how many they regularly turned away at Amazon. I think the "smart and gets things done" meme is really saying don't stop so soon.

Our laws grandfather in certain accepted behaviours which would be enormously difficult to retro-fit. Can you imagine trying to get gas (petrol)-fuelled vehicles going if they weren't allowed already? Driving tankers full of explosive fuel on public roads to gas stations on every corner where it will be kept in big tanks underground and pumped by untrained people into vehicles easily up to 25 years old maintained on an ad-hoc basis...

Our systems and businesses behave in the same way, too. As a startup you can get away with anything you can get away with. Had no backups for the first year? Ha ha, that was lucky, eh? Ran on a friend's server for 6 months? Left some customer details on a laptop that was stolen? Good thing you were small enough that nobody picked up on it and it made no scandal and caused no problems. Billing done mostly from one person's head? When you get bigger, you can't do that. Which means just starting a project becomes many times harder.

I think we overlook this effect quite a lot on dicussions on HN, where big companies are considered slow moving because they are inefficient and bureaucratic, whereas really, a lot of said "bureaucracy" covers things we want the companies we deal with to handle properly.

As Daniel's post said, as a consultant his task was to 'do the impossible'. I suspect quite a bit of this comes from being able to drop enough "important" "must have" requirements to be able to get moving again.
Have a read through this article for a simplified take on Function Point Analysis, which is the industry standard for estimation in larger projects:

http://inter-sections.net/2007/11/10/easy-estimates
In the top left corner is a little legend for the colors. The bottom right has the date of the commit. I had to watch in HD and fullscreen to even see them.

It was generated with code_swarm: http://code.google.com/p/codeswarm/
Running a successful beta - trickle effect and phone feedback
Great article ... err, matrix.

So, how do we stack up here?

With 15 years of experience, I SHOULD be a "3" in every category... but in reality, I'm more like 2/3 '2's and 1/3 '3's.

Chalk the shortfall up to laziness, I suppose.

How about the rest of you?
Very carefully. Never ever plan a block over 8 hours, usually between 2 and 6. And practice. It's not something you can learn easily, you have to adapt for your own brain.

People say they double their estimates, but I find it no longer necessary, I usually hit the time 1 hour +/-.
How many 'never gonna give you up' tracks were sold on iTunes since Rick Roll versus before Rick Roll?

I bet sales of that song went through the roof.
At the risk of being a metoo, it should be emphasized that things need to be doubled. I'm not sure why, but I constantly find that things take twice as long as I expect, even after accounting for the fact that things need to be doubled.

It sometimes helps to keep doubling it until it seems funny that it could take so long, and then step back once. ie, "Writing a parser will take a week. Two weeks. Four weeks... weeeeell, probably not four weeks - two weeks it is."

I also like to front-load things that I'm uncertain about, as playing catch-up near your deadline is easier when you have (hopefully over-estimated) well known tasks remaining.
The Land Tenure System of the United States
An informed criticism of something typically encountered at most a couple times in one's life.

Lots of obvious pain points.
Yeah that is almost certainly 95% of it. Not like Rails was languishing in obscurity before it went to Github. I just thought the visualization was cool.
A lot of people is still not anyone. I know several people on the other side of the coin who were incredibly smart and ambitious and resourceful and failed, with no one to fall back on, and now have some serious problems in their life. There is no doubt these guys would have bounced back a lot more easily if they had a trust fund to lean on.
http://samizdat.mines.edu/howto/HowToBeAProgrammer.html#id28...

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000245.html

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/10/26.html
Seth's Blog: Intentionally building communities (More hallway)
I'm pretty sure that had you written a tune that got viewed/listened to 150 odd million times (notwithstanding how god-awful it is!), and you'd received 11 pounds for it, you wouldn't think it was so funny.

Imagine if you'd written a game and you put it on iTunes, and you'd observed 150MM downloads, but only got 11 pounds from iTunes. You're telling me you wouldn't feel exploited?

There really is a double-standard at work here. When musicians/songwriters say they're being fleeced, members of this (hacker) community pooh-pooh them, and accuse them of being dinosaurs who just don't get it. When a developer writes an app that gets rejected by the iTunes store, devs are up in arms about lost dev time and the financial implication. Similarly if Google Checkout decides to terminate a developers account and said developer loses pending income.

It's totally natural for groups to look after their own, but one might have hoped that an elite community like Hacker News would be able to recognize this tendency. Sadly, from the evidence I've seen here from posters, whose views on the music industry are, generally speaking, at once flippant, condescending, arrogant, cold-hearted, and ill-informed, this is far from being the case.
Flagged for being gibberish.
I've worked for startups and for aerospace and defense contractors. There are of course different ways to approach software project estimation.

I've worked on projects where we needed to do details work breakdown structures: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work_breakdown_structure

And I've been in environments where I had to wing it with ever changing requirements where everything was all over the map.

Somewhere in the middle is the happy ground.

For perspective, I recommend reading the following book:

Software Estimation: Demystifying the Black Art by Steve McConnel (http://www.stevemcconnell.com/est.htm)

[Edit] Estimation is an iterative process both within a project (even if you are stuck in a god-awful waterfall) and with consecutive projects. You self train your estimation skills for doing similar work. Its when you hit something new that you don't have the past performance to draw upon that you really have to rely on your instincts. As a bottom line, I'm much less wrong when I go with my gut instincts than when I analyze and estimate ad nauseum.
Buyer Behavior in a Recession
Learn tips on lead nurturing and marketing during a recession with Marketo's webinar "Recession Marketing for B2B Vendors"
I like what they've done to improve the page. The only thing that sticks out a bit is the "yet" in "... is not yet participating". It sounds a bit pushy, like they are trying to pressure the company into participating.
I can't imagine that all that many people use Youtube as their music collection repository.

Just because someone listened to a tune on Youtube (or, as is the case for most Rick Astley listens, got rickrolled) doesn't mean that they would have bought the song to listen to it.

I have no sympathy for the music industry. They are monopolistic cartels that have abused the public and the artists for decades. Why are you defending them? Let them all go bust. The world will be a much better place without them.
He's not being fleeced. You think he'd be better off if Rick Astley was banned from Youtube? Without Youtube, there would be no Rickrolling, and there would be no value in having the rights to "Never Gonna Give You Up". Plus, I'm sure the phenomenon is making him money via making the song more popular in other more lucrative channels. This is making him money, just not as much as he'd like.
These same people would be quite happy to charge you 0.22p every time you whistle a copyrighted tune.

Fuck'em. Let them go bust. In fact, it is your duty as a human being to do whatever you can to help them go bankrupt faster, so the world is rid of their rotten business model.

When making an argument, particularly one as controversial as this, it is important to know who you're siding with. And sadly, in this case, you're siding with the bad guys.
I'm sure he has made far more than 11 pounds on the Rickrolling phenomenon.
The page does make it clearer when a company has endorsed the page or not. A couple observations

* I don't think the "X has Opted Out of this Community" and "X is not yet participating" states are both needed. Just labeling it as unofficial in both cases should be enough.

* The wording in the post a topic to the forum (#6) is strange sounding to me. Maybe "Ask X customers a question"
I don't understand why "SQL caching" means bypassing Rails.

I mean if you do whole page caching then you bypass Rails, after the first call. But if you're only caching the SQL call then you still need something to format it into HTML, which I'm guessing in Twitter's case is Rails.

You're also conflating Ruby (the language) and Rails (the web framework).
I'm surprised I didn't see any hot girls in bikinis at that site.

Here's a more informative article on brown fat: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/09/health/research/09fat.html
Ask how long roughly similar projects in the past have taken. Do not do any specific thinking about the detailed implementation. I'm serious!

http://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/09/planning-fallac.html
I think this is a reformatted version of this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=232192
Anyone know what emacs (assumption) mode he's using?
Enhanced protocol: 300 simultaneous realXtend Bots - see video
Now I'm really curious. This was on the front page a few hours ago, now it's dead. What special powers does one need to kill a link? Is Hacker News being gamed already, the current solution being editorial oversight?

To be fair, the humor piece about a grad student's day also made the front page and had about the same intellectual value as this one did. But it was better written and better targeted to this community.

It seems that the community (not just this one) is a fickle mistress. I'm really curious how a system can be built to stabilize it.
Calorie-Burning Fat? Studies Say You Have It (Brown Fat)
But you can already do it yourself customer side - keep track of what you spend per category, either in a text file, spreadsheet or dedicated budgeting program (Quicken, MS Money, etc).
It sounds better than "...is not participating" as that sounds like the company discredits the site. I think they should put "...is not officially participating" as that sounds like the company may or may not be part of the site.
You can do it too! See some of the programs you can use for this:
http://www.toplap.org/index.php/ToplapSystems

I have tried fluxus (http://www.pawfal.org/fluxus/) about a year ago and it involved some non-trivial tinkering before I could start it on my Ubuntu laptop.

Good tool to start conversations at developer conferences ;-)
Apples v. Oranges

If you put an app in the app store, you've got a contract with Apple explicitly stating how you share revenue. I can't complain about revenues from the app store if the game I wrote is being pirated outside of Apple's control.
On one project I worked on, we divided all feature requests into small, medium, large and huge (expected to be roughly 2, 5, 10, 20 days worth of effort respectively). This allowed us to come up with a quick overall costing of the project before starting - the estimates were gradually refined as we learned more about the system we were building. Looking back over the project, once most of the features were implemented, we could see that we had mostly underestimated the small features (they took maybe 3 or 4 days) and mostly overestimated the large or huge features.
But when radio stations play a song, potentially thousands of people are listening to it at the same time. In the case of YouTube, the upper boundary is a couple of people crowded around a monitor. How is even an order of magnitude reduction in cost for Google an "excellent deal"?
Of course, but it is a PITA and a small minority does it. Still, my point is the complexity problem he addresses in that example is due to the monolithic nature of the solutions he envisioned.
Thanks. I have looked at Seaside a bit and it looks impressive. I was impressed at how little code it seems to take to get something going.

My app will work best as a thick client, but I still need a website to sell it.
Sure, since you say so.