skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
True wealth is confidence..

Quote from George Foreman about longshoremen:

Mr. Foreman, who stared down financial collapse as an adult despite a troubled, impoverished childhood, said he knew real wealth when he saw it. “If you’re confident, you’re wealthy,” he says. “I’ve seen guys who work on a ship channel and they get to a certain point and they’re confident. You can look in their faces, they’re longshoremen, and they have this confidence about them...I’ve seen a lot of guys with millions and they don’t have any confidence,” he says. “So they’re not wealthy.”
What do you define as decent? If you want the vroom vroom get a cheap-ish sports car like the 350Z ($30K-range), which while being a bit high profile, is still low enough to ward off the gold diggers.

If you go higher into luxury sport car territory... that's your own fault :)
Yes! Just my 2c!
I guess that's cool. Do Python et al have something like that?
Not necessarily. Or rather, this works more for males than females. As Eddie Murphy once put it succinctly, "But you gotta be beautiful too. I don't want no funny, ugly bitch," or something like that. I find that appearances usually matter more to males than females.
I never use RSS.Why would I want to waste time more efficiently? It makes no sense.
I don't mean to be rude, but what a powerfully uninteresting story. Shame on you.
I don't get that, at least on 32bit Ubuntu at home, although I hear people have a pretty crap experience. Have always found it pretty stable on Fedora / Ubuntu for the last decade actually - I get the feeling they do all their testing on major distros only.

However we've just moved to 64bit Linux Flash 10 alpha on RHEL at work - which I suspect might change my impression. It has Z axis issues at least which the current 32bit one doesn't.
What's the incentive for producing content that you can't control the distribution of (ie profit from)?

edit: I mean from the perspectives of a producer, obviously the incentives of the artist are many.
Sometimes monkey patching is good actually. I use Soap4r all the time, and I preferred the debug xml to appear in the console rather than created as a separate file, it was really easy to make a monkey patch that fixed this, without modifying the actual distribution... that way other projects wouldn't be affected.

Another time, there was a small bug in Hpricot, rather than fix it directly in source, I patched it in my code, and removed the patch when the fix was in the production stream.

At least it's nice to have that option available...
Tell HN: How to stop Firefox tool tips from disappearing automatically
This has been bugging me forever (namely on xkcd), and I finally decided to do something about it. You can get it here: http://xkcdtips.appspot.com/
In this article, Mr. Boutin reveals his complete ignorance of systems engineering. Whether it's websites, software products, cars, blenders, or even packaged food, pretty-much any remotely novel product marketed and sold for use by everyday consumers goes through a "private beta" phase to weed out "bugs" in the system.

I suggest that Mr. Boutin learn a modicum about manufacturing and consumer product life-cycles before further attempting to practice journalism on the topic.

The really sad bit is NYT actually paid money for this "content" too.
I may have got the terminology wrong, but I was a part of the Smalltalk group when Visualworks was pushing out a VM enabling both generational and incremental GC -- with both in operation on the same image.
Save up a year of living expenses.
The problem isn't the two orders of magnitude difference in population. It's why more of the Java community hasn't clued into this bellweather relationship. This would make developments in the Smalltalk world also news in the Java world. This pattern has been in place for over a decade now, why so little clue?
40 is a large enough population for infection by marketdroids.
I find it hard to escape my comfort zone when I'm comfortable. When I had a "job" I would set a goal each year of setting up a small internet business. I called it a cyber lemonade stand. I wanted something small that I could learn from and experiment with different types of promotion. It wasn't until I left that job this happened. The years I was in my comfort zone I couldn't be pushed to do the uncomfortable thing of working extra to make a small business to learn from. Having my back against the wall seems to be a good motivator for getting things done.
It is not obvious to me that banking executives add "little value" as a general proposition. (Sure, a lot of them look like idiots today. I suspect this state of affairs will not persist to the end of time.)

Most of us here work on the Internet, right? Our businesses are essentially one big lever to apply intellectual capital, right? And every change is multiplicatively effective, right? 1% more signups is a 1% increase to the bottom line. 1% higher average ticket price is a 1% increase to the bottom line. 1% more traffic is a 1% increase to the bottom line. Each of these compounds.

Banking is like that, except it is one big multiplicative engine for capital capital instead of intellectual capital. Sitting at the top of the $100-billion-in-assets-under-management capital multiplication engine is an executive or ten. What is the 1% difference in outcomes between candidate A and candidate B worth to the firm? Well, if its multiplicative... oh, dear. (I know crony capitalism has caused a bit of the salary inflation -- but don't assume there is no fire just because you see a lot of smoke.)

Relative income parity, the historical norm for the vast majority of people for the last several thousand years, is an accident because historically everyone was operating under the same constraint: you can only labor for 24 hours a day. Some of us no longer operate under that constraint, because our particular combination of talents, skills, and markets do not measure productivity in hours. Our skills are super-scalar.

And, in a world with any skills that are super-scalar, income equality is doomed.

We saw hints of it in the last two bubbles, which might get dismissed because they were covered up by frothy madness. But I make something approaching the mean national income while sleeping just because I sell programs and selling programs scales really freaking well. Far, far better than selling programming expertise, which is a fairly well-paid field of endeavor to begin with.
Thanks for saying that - I was gonna pipe up but wasn't sure if it was public information. :-)
Taking things further, one can even imagine therapy tools that automatically introduce relatively minor bugs.
Maybe I have been extremely lucky my whole life, but I have never thought of a startup as being risky.

Financial risk is all about investing your personal human capital and looking for the highest expected value.

When I approached the end of college, I looked at what I was given (mediocre programming skills, some street smarts, a knack for bs) and I realized that my expected financial return was much higher in a startup.

Take 5 years out for example.

Assumptions:

- 10% at 20 M = 2 M
- 10% at 10 M = 1 M
- 10% at 5 M = 500k
- 10% at 500,000 = 50,000
- 60% at nothing = $0
- Total of 3.55 M expected return on my personal human capital

- 100% at 500k (salary over 5 years, being generous)
- Total of 500k expected return

3.55 M > 500k. Of course these numbers are personal, and everyone is different, but I don't think they are unrealistic.
I once slept in a guest room in an Oxford flat where Doug had previously slept, as we both know Ted Nelson.

Ted told me that was a valid anecdote, so who am I to argue?
Ask YC: iPhone Developers for Hire
Can anyone recommend a good iPhone development team, or any good hacker, who is available for hire to build an iPhone app? The app would work in conjunction with the ecommerce website, villagehatshop.com. We have a few ideas of some fun things the app could do, and we want to talk with some pros about the new functionality becoming available in the 3.0 firmware. Any ideas or recommendations would be awesome! Thanks!
I suppose they called it the Pirate Bay because they like parrots?
This is the second post I've read claiming that Perl is better tested than Ruby.

Why is this a topic of discussion? Is someone from the Ruby community running around saying otherwise?
Why are some parts of the country considered more "laid back" than others or considered to have more "nice people?" I suspect that environmental factors are very important in terms of teaching people emotional and social coping skills. The Lord of the Flies environment we've created in many schools, where the only adults that kids can model after are in the same unpopular, beleaguered position as umpires at a baseball game, and the only other available models are kids who have just been there a couple of years longer.

It's not that schools teaching emotional intelligence is a great idea. It's more that the status quo at most schools is just plain bad.
TrailBehind Map now includes hundreds of thousands of Wikipedia places
1. Sex is overrated. Like they said in the 40 year old virgin, don't put the pussy on a pedestal. If someone doesn't like you for who you are, they are probably not worth the time to sleep with. Find someone you can love, it's a much more rewarding experience, trust me.

2. If you are bent on being a "player", and you are smart (truly smart, not just smart as in able to program smart), then you can probably learn how to do it. Human beings are not that complicated.
Particles have free will?
if you think a 30K car will ward off gold diggers you are way off. 20-25K is the most you can spend, and even then that accounts if you are buying new, if you buy a used M3 all bets are off.
Building computer tools to cure perfectionism.
One could imagine building tools that automatically introduces minor errors into whatever one is working on.

For example, when building a user interface, the UI builder could introduce minor position errors.

When writing an email, a tool could introduce minor typos, inconsistent spacing, etc.

All of this is to make people paralyzed by perfectionism confront the reality that minor errors are ok.

And even in cases where minor errors can lead to disaster, the mental health of the software developer is more important than any product after all.
Me.

I had kept a day job and worked on my startup only in (all) my spare time for more than 2 years, that _is_ challenging, kind of keeping-an-out-of-marriage-affair challenging -- you get the idea. (or do you? :)
The ECB can be a bit heavy, there is also the lighter, simpler, newer emacs-nav extension.

http://code.google.com/p/emacs-nav/
How on Hacker News did we get into talking about which sports car will get you laid but still ward off gold diggers? There are at least three things there that, no offense because I'm including myself, this would be the last place I'd look for advice on.
Books have been a good model for music, as far as technological effects go.

Technological advances in publishing have acted to democratize the industry. We have fewer ultra superstars like Hemmingway. (J.K. Rowling seems to be the most recent one.) But publishing a book is something almost anyone can do on their own now, albeit with considerable effort, so you don't necessarily need to be an ultra-superstar to earn a living at it. You may have to devote considerable effort promoting yourself, though, and you'll probably have to tour.

You can replace "books" with "music" and most of the paragraph would apply just as well, minus the sentences mentioning J.K. Rowling and Hemmingway.

I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing, though. It used to be that all entertainment culture was locally produced and consumed, in the form of parlour music and after dinner stories. When media enabled this to be centrally produced, this also enabled extreme concentrations of wealth. However, it also took away people's power to produce their own culture. Now technology is putting it back into the hands of the people.

So no, hopefully file sharing won't save Hollywood. Hopefully some significant portion of it will remain as a gathering place for some of the best and brightest talents, but Hollywood's former brilliance will be shattered and redistributed to everyone out there.
If you ignore the fact that anything is the name of an Emacs plug in, the blog post becomes a masterpiece of surrealism.
I got sold on ECB from the guy with the Textmate -> Emacs screencast (I'm a 10+ year Emacs person, but I'm impressionable).

I never turn it on anymore; it's slow and finicky and I can't integrate it into my workflow.

anything.el looks amazing. Quicksilver for Emacs. I'm dropping everything to play with it right now.
Sounds like Dennis Rodman. Except he didn't pay them to leave afterward, he just threw them out.
It's interesting that they chose to focus on undergrad business students rather than MBAs. I would guess that undergrad biz majors are going to be more flexible about career options than MBA students.
Caching decreases load on application servers! Film at 11!
Just Let Go
You're probably better off looking at some of the research on positive psychology

http://www.ppc.sas.upenn.edu/

http://www.authentichappiness.sas.upenn.edu/Default.aspx

and seeing if you can automate some of the cognitive training that comes out of that research to reduce your paralyzing perfectionism.

http://talentdevelop.com/1130/tal-ben-shahar-on-letting-go-o...

Introducing errors into a program intentionally doesn't sound like the best way to help a programmer.
Do you have any specific therapies in mind?

BTW, intentional errors are described here:

http://books.google.ca/books?id=w6ESB0Ys4IoC&pg=RA1-PA24...
Maybe I'm dense, but if you go to the wrong room you'll only know you're at the wrong room. How do you know what the correct room is?
Thanks - I'll check Emacs-nav out. ECB does seem clunky.

Also I found the Tango theme in the process of googling emacs-nav (finally a better one to replace Twilight :). http://www.flickr.com/photos/jaaronfarr/3364808876/
My female friends also tell me: "Tell her she's beautiful!" Apparently, most girls use this as the litmus test for whether a guy is into her. If he doesn't find her attractive, or isn't willing to say so, she won't find him attractive. This even seems to apply to girls that are already sleeping with you: they'll ditch you for a guy that compliments them more at the first opportunity.

I haven't had a chance to test this, since I'm still ignoring the first 4 steps. But I have on occasion accidentally made certain friends develop a crush on me by offhandedly calling them pretty. So it seems to work fairly well.
Which is awesome, by the way.
I agree with you, but if you get detailed, you might also question the use of "culture" as in "who has the testing culture again?" to be more indicative of Ruby developers as a community (which is a word the author also uses in praise of it)

I think the words were poorly chosen. I understand the main point, which IMO supports your assertion. But knowing the habits of people surfing the web, I can certainly understand how it doesn't appear that way to everyone.
I'm opening a gourmet dessert store this summer. Last week a Harvard MBA student asked me if she could do a free summer internship for me so that she can have something to put on her resume. I'm still really surprised about it - is the market for MBA students really that bad? Well, I'm not going to turn down free labor.
heh. Emotional intelligence: something liberal arts people made up so they don't feel quite so bad about being kindof dumb.
The placebo opiate link is widely known. Naloxone blocks opiate receptors which blocks placebo effect. Also, children aren't susceptible to a placebo effect.

Check out a good lecture on pain at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gQS0tdIbJ0w for more context.
That sound like a not really smart idea. If the product is good enough, ship it, that's the project leader (or whoever is "in charge") job.
I don't know what perfectionism the post refers, but time spent improving performance, maintainability, etc, is an investment (that may or may not pay). Introducing bugs seems a double whammy: a significant effort must be put at introducing bugs so they're not critical and then fixing them, at least think on the carbon-footprint of that waste!
Besides, any non trivial project had enough bugs/enhancements to keep even the best programmers busy...
If anybody wants a CSS preprocessor like the C55 preprocessor mentioned in this video, check out http://sandbox.pocoo.org/clevercss/

It's pretty good.
Map of high-speed rail lines planned for US
You could have tools that automatically introduce minor bugs. And you would ship with these minor bugs.

The idea is to force an environment on your developers where perfectionism is impossible. And so this may have positive mental health benefits.
You're blaming evolution for womens' generally execrable tastes in men, but the source of the problem is likely cultural and psychological.

A large proportion of American women have been raised with an unspoken and often subliminal belief that sex is filthy, painful and degrading. This association is formed at a young age and most women are not aware that they have it, but it leads them to become attracted to men who are boorish, stupid, and threatening, rather than the intelligent and decent guys. Often, they are actually completely incapable of being sexually attracted to men who don't threaten and degrade them on, at the least, a subconscious level. This is what's at hand in the case of "you're a nice guy, but I'm sorry, I'm just attracted to you. I really wish I was, but I'm not".

This doesn't describe the majority of women or relationships, but it does describe nearly all of the sexually "loud" women. It seems paradoxical, but promiscuous women almost always have this subconscious distaste for sex, while relatively chaste women often have only a trace of it.
Ask HN: Why is Python so strict about automatically casting differently typed literals?
I hate having to use str() and int() all the time. Am I doing something wrong? If not, what is the reasoning behind their requirement? I think most of the automatic casts are pretty well defined in any given situation.
Intentional error therapy is described here:

http://books.google.ca/books?id=w6ESB0Ys4IoC&pg=RA1-PA24...
RSS feels like a kludge to me, so use it I do not.
Thanks for writing this, benreesman. I appreciate the comments you made such as http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=245964 and http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=245955

Neither of those seem trollish to my eyes.
I look forward to talking with you.
It's analogous to the immune response. Of course adults are going to be resistant to ideas that are a total mind-$%^#! If something does not fit in with your foundation model of reality, then it's likely an exploit meme. (Like, "We are the messengers of the supreme being. You must convince others of this, and also give us 10% of your earnings!")

This poses a special problem for the transmission of things like values -- some of which are not exploit-memes but actually valuable heuristics for mutual benefit. (Like honesty and fairness.) Since the contexts that preoccupy the mainstream of each generation change so dramatically now, the lack of common context impedes the demonstration of values by an older generation to a younger one. Several centuries ago, it would be commonplace to find 3 generations on the same dance floor, all having fun dancing to the same music. Now, this is considered to be a ridiculous situation.

This change is so rapid now, that you see generational rifts in recent pop phenomena like Anime fandom. A friend of mine who was an MC at some of the early Anime Expos got trashed online by some kid over some bit of web forum etiquette. I'm sorry, but someone that connected with the history of your scene deserves a little patience and an explanation. (I'm sure others have similar anecdotes from Hip-Hop or skateboarding. Heck, there should be plenty of programming related anecdotes similar to this.)
Venture Capital Down 50%. It’s Not Just the Recession, Folks.
I think the answer is surprisingly few. This makes it hard because you need to have the ganas enough to a) quit b) devote most of your time. On top of that, you need to have a co-founder who is willing to make the same sacrifice. Having a co-founder who isn't on the same page isn't completely worthless but it can be terribly frustrating.
A classic but I'm not quite sure why it was posted? Initially thought they'd made the text available online, which would be cool. But alas.

Is the Google Code or design-a-cover thing the actual news here?
Could you clarify how you arrived at the numbers for the five year expected return?
I've had opportunities to leave a comfortable day job to work on startups. What kept me from joining up wasn't just risk but I didn't believe it would be a success. That's most important. Bootstrapping my own startup has taken more time but I've been completely relaxed on it and able to really set my launch up well without having to worry about supporting my family through a risky situation.
The idea is much simply - they cannot run 64-bit installation in production, because it is just an emulation, not virtualization as it should be.

And for developers this kind of setup is good enough. Test and production runs on bare hardware.

It is the same stupidity as to put jvm-based stuff under emulation and wait for performance and profit.
Without harshing on your data (esp the denominators of population size as you remark), you do show that it's far from absolutely necessary to be in the Valley.

But to put it in perspective: in Valley vs. World, it's doing disproportionately well.
An incredibly masculine-focused article even if it made plenty of attempts to try to generalise across both the sexes.

Being a smart woman gives you totally different dating prospects than being a smart guy (and not just the obvious). Seriously.

It also gives you reasons to turn off the opposite sex that don't seem to be mentioned in the article - for example a lot of women play it dumb for fear of intimidating the guy they're flirting with. I've even caught myself doing it, which is saying a lot - I wear my IQ and education like a suit of armour most of the time.
5 must have books for programmers
Every programmer should have these books on his or her shelf. The authors of these books cover a wide range of material in the form of design patterns, real-life experiences, code samples, and software construction
The object is to make apps that customers want and to make them fast. If you can do that with minimal testing then I "advantage Ruby".

Another way to put it is "Uhh... guys... you don't get paid for testing"
I'm surprised, then, that you would so flippantly dismiss this with such an ignorant statement. Java has had a generational gc for the majority of its existence, since version 1.2 (released '98, only 2 years after Oak dropped), which, of course, implies that its had an incremental or concurrent collector (or more appropriately, collectors - you can pick which one you want to use in Java-land, too) since at least then, as well.

If you had clicked past the pretty terrible article title and actually read up on this collector, you'd realize that isn't the "generational" or "incremental" that's important, it's the "compacting" part that, along with some implementation details, cuts down on management overhead and reduces fragmentation, and the effort to provide soft real-time behavior, along with some cool configuration parameters where you can specify how much of a given timeslice you're willing to give up for gc.

There are a lot of things that you can be critical of Java for, but slouching on the vm isn't really one of them.
That's my thought. I pay more than $12 a year on notebooks, and all I do is doodle in those.
If I were a strategist at Apple, I'd encourage this. People are drawn to jingoism. (Especially the irrational kind: http://www.chomsky.info/interviews/1992----02.htm) Having an "alternative" that keeps the users firmly focused on the iPhone platform would be very good for Apple.