skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Did Bill Gates really think about how much
of his future wealth would be taxed when he
started Microsoft? Or how about Steve Jobs
when he started Apple? My guess is ego and
the desire to succeed were more important.
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Excellent post! Especially relevant to this audience.

When I read "How to Get Rich" by Felix Dennis, I made a list of 10 things I had to do to affirm my commitment. "Get rid of my TV" was #1. I did it and it has made a huge difference. A few points:

- I put a radio next to my computer. It's much easier to work with radio than with TV.

- I watch a couple of shows with my mother and SO on their TVs, not mine. 2 to 3 hours per week.

- I only watch sports at a sports bar. If I'm going to spend 3 hours and $50, I think long and hard about which games are really important. I have also made lots of new friends at Steeler bars. I can't imagine watching a game alone ever again.

- Someone please let me know if Michael and Lincoln are still alive when "Prison Break" ends its run in 3 weeks. This was my last "favorite show". There will not be another.
I wonder how much of the NT codebase is still portable. Back in the "early days" you could get NT for MIPS and Alpha (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_NT#Supported_platforms) but I don't think Microsoft is willing to make a ARM version of Windows v.Next. This seems to be a pretty huge roadblock for manufacturers of these netbooks. It's my opinion that to remain mainstream and continue to sell large numbers of units they (Asus, MSI, etc) will have to offer Windows on every model.
The internet has made agitprop more efficient along with everything else. Social media is by definition a large group of civilians on a coffee break. Anyone with an agenda and a certain twist of mind can cause large disturbances... when I bring this up to people in abstract they don't really get it. Maybe this example will help.
Out of curiosity, how many times in your career have you decided to switch databases halfway into a project?

In 15 years of doing this for a living, I've never actually needed to do so. With that in mind, I don't feel particularly worried that my SQL is not instantly portable.
By never developing a TV habit and instead relying on the internet to provide me with the few things I find enjoyable to watch, I've managed to reach a stage when I'm surprised that people actually watch TV, given the choice. If you've never done so before, try living for a week without your usual multimedia hit, there's a fair chance you'll like that extra few hours.
"I've been watching my 'exempt' shows on my laptop for over a year"

I thought about this, but for me, this doesn't count. Even if the screen is part of a computer, it is still a "TV". Separating my dev and internet machines has made this a moot point.
Google App Engine should give app *users* an estimate of how "permanent" the site is.
The idea is to use existing data to guesstimate how well an app will scale and whether Google would be willing to fund its scalability via ads in case its developer(s) are not willing to pay.

This sort of assurance of the permanence of a site could really do wonders for Web 2.0.

P.S. Although the GAE already provides a permanence of sorts, not providing additional resources for scalability would make the site completely unusable if it ever becomes popular. Users need to be given some assurance that this will not be the case.
It has taken me years to absorb perl's little idiosyncrasies and I've learned to like it. Then I read perl6 docs and I can no longer defend using perl. For example, here's the perl6 tertiary assignment:

my $foo = $bar < 1 ?? 0 !! 1;

Every other language on the planet including perl uses ?: for the tertiary but perl6 just had to be different for no good reason other than to be different. No. No, No, No thank you. Consistency matters. The most important feature in any programming language is clarity. Producing Pascal's Triangle using less than 5 characters of source code is not something programming language designers should be aspiring to. Python is looking better every day.
I think people can only agree to disagree when they can see past their differences. If it's something like which are better, tomatoes or potatoes, then it is easy. If it is something deeper to one's center like PC or Mac, or some programming language then it's harder, and conflict can end up huge if it's over life and death or reputation building. In mostly anonymous and almost random meetings, such as HN, agreeing to disagree is hard, and more often than not, conflict or alliance is expressed through moderation rather than enmity or camaraderie.

At the end of the day, I tend to view argument as vulgar, but put up with it in striving for truth.
Record number of guns in Mexico traced to the US
While this is an older essay, this is up there with one of my favorite PG essays

This part always has particularly far-reaching consequences.

The problem here is not wealth, but corruption. So why not go after corruption?

People like to assail lobbyists and the super-rich corporations that supposedly buy favorable policy, and of course, everyone then blames the rich for it. But it's not the rich that deserve the fundamental blame. It's the politicians that directly create policy, and can enforce that policy at gunpoint. No amount of money gives you legal authority to stick a gun in someone's face.

It's the government, and only the government that make the laws - not the lobbyists and not the rich. Economic power is not the same thing as political power.

Which is why transparency (which PG also speaks about) is so key.
Google is certainly no stranger to "VML for IE, SVG for everybody else": it's what Google Maps uses.
You predict what a hyperoperator does by knowing what the non-hyper operator does. Your question about predictability reads to me like asking "You can modify verbs with adverbs! How in the world do you know what a verb means?"
if you have troubles please try to specify.

Sometimes the site is safe but u get an attack by other means.
No apache. Nginx is talking to Django over a Unix file sock with fastcgi.
depending on your website kind, forums (like digital points) can be a good place to find cheap testers (if your site is a non-brain application)
Perl 6 changed the syntax of the ternary conditional operator for other reasons: less ambiguity of syntax, for one. (If you're really curious about the reasoning, I believe Apocalypse 3 "Operators" explains.)

The interesting question is whether Perl 6 can slough off syntactic baggage from C and Perl 5 for the purpose of clarity and attract more new programmers. I believe the changes from regular expressions to grammars demonstrate the viability of this concept.
Well the google code support was started long time before Python started looking for a DVCS.
If one had an influence on the other it was probably the other way round.
A Brief History of the English Language Part 2
Great article! Recognize though that time is not fungible. For example just because you stop watching tv from 9pm to 10pm doesn't mean your going to be productive <insert task> in that same block of time after working a full day at your day job.

Based on a lot of our responses, I think a lot of us are just substituting web surfing for watching tv (self included). So how do we keep from just substituting another time sink for tv? How much time do we waste "web surfing" in the evening when we could be doing something else more generative?
Unless, as swolchek says above (or possibly below), there are cultural differences to be aware of. Women and men can respond differently to the same stimuli, just as different cultures do (consider, for example, what seniority means in a Japanese workplace versus Silicon Valley).

You're right that gender is not so much the point as people with different perspectives being able to collaborate efficiently and effectively.

I just wanted to emphasize that the goal is a broader open mindedness of people interaction.
I think Google is making some bad choices with the technologies that they are choosing to support (Python/Java over Ruby, Mercurial over Git).

While there might be technological advantages to Python/Java/Mercurial, the Ruby and Git communities are a more evangelical and willing to try new things.
Darn. I was really hoping they'd pick git, to help one dvcs win the stalemate and I would never have to become proficient in both :-)

Now google has probably put the balance back to a tie between the two systems- Git probably was in the lead before this announcement.
How Not to Work for The Man: Jonathan Sposato on Life at Picnik, Microsoft, and Google
I don't know why you're voted down. It seems to me that the title once again misses the reasonable point hidden in the article.

Communication is always important. How one communicates, or in this case talks about minorities, is important, as are addressing a complex problem in multiple ways (eg, with actions as well as communication).
It's probably awesome, in the same way that git and hg are awesome. But how does it compare to hg or git? What is the network performance? How easy is it to implement the network protocol, and add BigTable support for it?
Agreed, thats what I did, but at the end of the day now I have my unfinished project on a flash drive and no functioning computer to fix it - not all that useful unless you have another Windows machine with Solidworks installed ready to go - and at a few thousand bucks a seat not many people do. I don't think Windows crashes any more frequently than Linux but it is more catastrophic I feel.
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We act as if most of our tax money goes to poor people. That just isn't the case. This entire argument is a lie on it's face. I don't think anyone seriously thinks we should all be equal financially, only that people deserve health care, food and shelter, even if they are "lazy" or "stupid". Guaranteeing these basic human needs wouldn't cost as much as people think. Even reducing the taxes that poor people pay would help immensely. It's a fallacy that the poor don't pay taxes, they do. There are other taxes besides income taxes, some of them even go into the same exact pool of money. Many rich end up paying _less_ taxes then poor people do, as a percentage of their income.
I'm not. It still lags behind in usability (even though they want this to be one of their strong points) and performance (which they promised to fix ever since 1.0). They also don't have any large projects actually using it.

Bazaar tries to be simple, but they currently have so many different repository formats and supported workflows that everything is a mess. Using one format on the local side, and a different format on the remote can cause a performance loss. Commands do different things in one repository than in another, depending on how it is set up. They have the weird 'a branch is a directory' thing, and using lightweight branches like in git is a mess. That, and something like 9 of the top 10 developers work for Canonical, so it seems there's just not much interest of the open source community. What happens if Canonical stops getting money from millionaires? Will Bazaar still be supported? Do you want your product to depend on that?
I've moved from sqlite to serialization via Lua on one, when clarifying the problem made it clear that using a relational database was actually a poor fit. Most of my examples aren't database-related, though. I agree that switching databases doesn't happen much, I'm just noting that having a major, conceptually distinct part of a project entangled with the others is usually a sign of other problems. (Maybe that's just my experience maintaining legacy codebases, though.)

I think that getting preoccupied with moving from one database to another for scalability reasons is usually wishful thinking -- it's like worrying about all the positive attention you're getting.
Now you're attacking Brad for attacking Tom when he never personally attacked him. Brad isn't a "wanna-be blogger", at least as far as I know the man. He sent me a link to the post and said "I hope he changes some of the wording" -- he just wanted the god docs to accurately reflect the production status. That's all. Oh, and make millions of dollars off of all blog subscribers I'm sure he got as a result. That was sarcasm, by the way.

Brad never ripped on anything else Tom has done. He never even suggested that the state of the god docs reflected poorly on him as a developer or a person. He was merely supplying information and venting frustration over the previous six months he spent attempting to get Tom's product to work properly. Hell, he wasn't even mad that it was (for him) an incomplete, non-functioning product, he was just upset that it wasn't presented as such!

I didn't know who Tom Preston-Werner was before this post, but apparently he has indeed bootstrapped several successful startups and is a great open source contributor. Good for him, and I thank him for his contributions. One of the reasons I want to become financially secure is so that I can devote most of my time to OSS, so everyone who contributes largely to said software gets my utmost respect and admiration. I don't see how any of that has any bearing on the status of god's documentation, however.
I should also say I believe everyone should have equal access to education, but anyone who can't see how this benefits society as a whole isn't worth arguing with. The only valid argument for non-equal access is pure selfishness and competitive advantage for the offspring of the wealthy.
> Every other language on the planet including perl uses ?: for the tertiary...

Including Python? ;-)
Jailhouse Tech Sniffs Out 'Cell' Phones
In prison, the cellphone is a deadly weapon: Inmates can use contraband phones to plot more crime, intimidate or kill witnesses or plan escape. But the introduction of the Safe Prisons Communications Act of 2009 -- which would amend federal law to allow jamming technology to block smuggled cell phones -- has prompted a showdown between jamming advocates and wireless communications companies.

Jammers, however, are not the only tool for battling contraband cellphones. Several companies are marketing cellphone detection as a smarter alternative to jamming. The principle is straightforward: instead of blocking signals, prison authorities can use a network of sensors to detect cellphone transmissions, measure their use and triangulate their location.

I spoke recently to Terry Bittner of ITT Corporation, which markets a system called Cell Hound. It's currently installed in some state and federal institutions. According to Bittner, a system like Cell Hound is more of an intel tool. Illicit phones are often hidden with other contraband -- and detectors can not only locate phones, but track the patterns of the callers. "You need to study the habit of the phone -- who uses it most of the time, how it got in there," he said. "They will never store the phone in a cell where they use it. They rent it out to other inmates. In some cases they won't use the phone." Cell Hound scans for the most common cellphone radio-frequency signatures in North America; a central server then maps the location and gives a visual alert on a corrections officer's workstation.

ITT is not the only company in this game, however. Israeli prisons also have a major issue with contraband phones (pictured here); Israeli electronic warfare firm Netline also markets a cellphone detection system with a central control. Cellphone detection could potentially have other applications, too: Detecting illicit cellphone use inside secure conference facilities, or to aid a network in pushing marketing messages or alerts to mobile phones.

Typically, law enforcement and intelligence agencies don't like to advertise what kinds of tools they use to counter or detect illicit communications. ITT, for instance, initially marketed Cell Hound in a very low-key fashion; but pending legislation in Congress, as Bittner described it, forced the company to "come out of the closet" with its technology.
I think older versions of God work Ok.

My hopes for this article is that I can shorten the evaluation for others who consider God. Consider this the "Monit (like god, only it works)" of "God (like monit, only awesome)" post.
This is a really good point; I hadn't considered that view. So on your internet machine, do you consider 'mindless internet surfing' watching TV?

I also keep my work and internet machines separate.
But if Microsoft will go to such huge lengths... are they actually more secure than Linux? Or are there lengths that they won't go to, no matter how much they spend?
We currently have 11, plus some contractors.
If you enjoyed this interview, you're sure to love his book.

iWoz: Computer Geek to Cult Icon: How I Invented the Personal Computer, Co-Founded Apple, and Had Fun Doing It
http://www.amazon.com/iWoz-Computer-Invented-Personal-Co-Fou...

It's a really interesting look into Woz's mind and his life. It's especially endearing to engineers. I couldn't put it down till I finished it.
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It's a little harder to get rid of your tv when it has basically been completely replaced by a laptop. I do use my laptop for productive, and so I don't think I would really want to get rid of it.

Otherwise, it sounds like great advice. I'll have to give up tv shows and movies for a few weeks to try it.
Thanks Marcos. We were running db:migrate on push a long time ago for a while, but we ended that practice when serious production applications started moving on to the platform.

We found that running db migrations explicitly is very important for a mission critical production app.
I'm just going to say that when you slip a major release date for a multi-billion-dollar product by several weeks just to go back through all your code to see if there were any integer overflows that you might have missed, after somebody points out a new code pattern that might lead to them, you've firmly established yourself at one end of the spectrum.

I simply don't believe that any other team, open source or commercial, would do something like this. I've seen too many of both kinds of teams blow off actual documented vulnerabilities to think that they'd hurt their own progress to chase down hypothetical ones.

The rest of the discussion is academic to me. By all means, use Linux. We do for our Rails app. Hooray for open source.
I actually went back and forth on the wording, there. I decided "fantasize" sounded a bit too harsh -- some people are probably just underestimating how much one RDBMS can handle, due to a combination of buzz about scalability issues and bad experiences running databases without indexes, normalized tables, etc.
"do you consider 'mindless internet surfing' watching TV?" No.

Activity Value Reasoning
------------------------- ----- -------------------------
watching TV 0 totally passive
mindless internet surfing 1 you do some initiating
actively working 9 usually produces benefits
reading Hacker News 10 basic research :-)
I bet Google picked Mercurial because it was easier for them to hack on and adapt to their infrastructure. A "libgit" is on lots of people's wish list, but the official developers seem pretty happy with the hodgepodge of binaries.
Are you being facetious or do you really believe evangelism trumps technology?
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I like the point about achievable success vs aggressive learning.
only that people deserve health care, food and shelter

Why? These aren't automatically available in nature. They require work, and the application of the mind, to acquire. Health Care is a service provided by individuals. People have a "right" to health care only inasmuch as those who are capable of delivering said health care are willing to do so (that is, voluntarily).

The same goes with food gathering/storing/preparation and building manufacturing. Someone has to provide these services, and to state that because someone "deserves it" that those services must be rendered (without concern for rendering individual's agreement), well, that's the master-slave relationship.
I think GvR working at Python has something to do with it. If, instead, Yukihiro Matsumoto had gone to work at Google and build a team developing development technologies around Ruby, things might be different. Not that it's that big of a change either way.
I didn't understand this part:

"If you want to reduce economic inequality instead of just improving the overall standard of living, it's not enough just to raise up the poor. What if one of your newly minted engineers gets ambitious and goes on to become another Bill Gates? Economic inequality will be as bad as ever."

What about your newly minted teachers and other middle-class citizens? Does everyone who rise from poverty become super rich?

I don't understand economics well, so I can't really counter his overall argument, but this seemed a little offhanded.
I agree with the OP that this is a positive sign. The only thing that surprises me it that it seems to be a free-format arrangement of a word that can be used in a positive way. We have a magic comment word ("kludge", if you must know) that we use for code that we wish we had time to write better; that in principle allows us to go back and find things to fix after the fact, or helps troubleshooting since kludges are more likely to break.
Keep building and don't give up. I see where you're coming from, so just keep building and launch as soon as you can.

Oh, and welcome to the community. I look forward to seeing more clear and honest contributions from you in the future.
'Sleep talking' PCs save energy and money
Your point is valid, but I think it's a bit extreme to say that guaranteeing basic care makes everyone else a slave. A slave works for nothing to enrich others; a doctor loses some money caring for indigent patients but doesn't become poor while the patients become rich. There is a natural limit there.
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So people would be more productive if they worked during every waking hour? Amazing. I enjoy watching a good movie or ball game. Life isn't just about working. You have to spend some of the time you have here enjoying yourself.
"""except ours isn't for gov't uses, but to map your personal photos with names using facebook pictures"""

Like http://www.polarrose.com does?
I sure hope that means Hg support with github
Kevin Rose regrets dropping out of school too early
I also watch sports at my local bar.. now I have a whole different 'genre' of friends who happen to not spend their day in front of a computer. Socially, it has been quite a learning experience!

If you lack self control with regard to TV watching I can't recommend enough how much better your life will be. If your scared, try cutting the AC power cord. Give it a week.
Brain Gain: Adderall and Start Ups
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