skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Three misc thoughts:

1) To me there seems to be a long distance between "no place for open source" vs "open source will shape but not win..."

2) While it may be so that "the vendors of today are the same vendors of 10 years ago"; that does not hold true when sliding this 10yr window back in time. I certainly don't think its fair to say this will needs hold true in future either. Maybe the best that can be said is that "vendors appear to have time constant of around 10yrs"

3) What's with all this talk of "winning" anyway? Winning implies there is an end / finish line - tech is so transitory I don't know if its possible to say anyone has ever "won" anything, maybe "dominated" for some period of time, but its never really over, is it?
I don't buy it. The Germans had the best tanks in WWII, and the best submachine guns. They practically invented the assault rifle with the MP44.
I was thinking of an auction over a specific time period to set price levels. I think it would also be well to have it re-run/revisited later, to see if the same price levels still apply (see previous iPhone app charge change articles).
My "startup" - http://www.obsidianportal.com - caters directly to several of your targets. By combining my entrepreneur bent w/ my shameful D&D playing, I've made a pretty penny.
Mac OS X is what I use at home on my iMac and MacBook. At work I use Linux on compute servers for development and data analysis, and connect to the machines via (cough) Windows.
There's an app called KatMouse for Windows which might be able to do focus follows mouse.

(I really use it because it lets me use the scrollwheel on any window, without bringing the window to the foreground or giving focus to it).
I've used OP once or twice, actually. Cheers!
I use Windows, various versions, both at work and at home. Ubuntu only at home, but more and more. Going to try a Mac OS just for fun.
"You should not improve the people...you should replace the people."

We're not looking to "replace" people. We're looking to add them. We have the envious position of being able to use our already considerable wealth to attract more of the worlds very best and brightest. This will allow us to build even more wealth and attract even more of the best... etc.

We've got the benefit of a virtuous cycle that would, if unchecked, allow the US to virtually monopolize all talent in the world. Severely limiting the use of this advantage may be the best thing the Americans can do to help the poorer emerging counties reach for prosperity of their own. How's that for unintended consequences?
Social Skydiving with a Code Monkey Day 11: Socializing Isn't Just About Me
Mixing doesn't create diversity, it eliminates it as people gravitate towards a common basis of law and culture. Entire languages are either extinct or spoken only by small fringe minorities thanks to cultures mixing together in the same country (or even the same nation-state, or previous membership in the same nation-state as in the case of Eire).

And it turns out that having separate countries protects cultural diversity too. What's the law in a country shared between people who have polygamous traditions and people who have a tradition where only monogamy is allowed?
You have a point. My closeted complexity theorist persona thinks it would be a lot more interesting to study the special cases of P (not just LOG, but seeing how O(n) and O(n²) or "NO(n)" problems behave) instead of the most general cases.
This hardly seems to justify your sweeping assertions above, and the review (by Steve Sailer, who I'm afraid I do not consider an objective commentator) seems to suggest that the fault lies entirely with the population in question, ignoring the book authors' own conclusion that institutional discrimination is a major limiting factor in Mexican-American economic development.

Sailer writes: Their book is a monument to disinterested, objective social science. but seems uninterested in reporting the context in which these trends take place, preferring an interpretation of racial degeneracy.

The publisher's description and one other review present a considerably more nuanced picture than the one you chose to quote (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0871548488/ref=cm_rdp_produ...) I do not think a selective book review from a tinfoil-hat-wearing race baiter makes the cut.
Agreed with above, although $25k might be more realistic for the SF Bay Area if you're not naturally very frugal. Just to make it a little more concrete if you choose the first option:

- $700-$1200/mo for rent+utils (1BR in shared space, south bay vs. SF)

- $200-$500/mo (cooking vs. eating out)

- $50-$400/mo (ascetic vs. lover-of-gadgets)

- $200/mo for basic healthcare + other bills

- $100/mo for public transportation

- $100/mo for exigencies

Feel free to email me if you have questions! (see profile) I've been working for six months in SF, living in MV.

By the way, I think it's great that you have a sense of perspective already (and the savvy to be filling your Roth IRA...) that kind of stuff is priceless.
i dont seem to hate his post as much as most here do. In fact if anything, im suprised that he went so lightly on the 20% Peter-principle-bucket folks.

While I agree on the breakdown, my personal feeling is that the lame 20% is the reason why the other 60% exist. They allow it, and through incentivizing the wrong behavior grow it.
If they stamped it out (and they are the people in the position to do it) n% of the 60 will up their game (because it now becomes the strategy closely allied to their own self interests) and n% will leave, which I think is an ok result n the long run anyway..
Most used? My smartphones: I used WebOS (linux underneath) and MacOS (stripped down iphone version) the most.
Please date the article, it's almost 6 years old.
The reviewer is irrelevant. I posted quotations from the book.
but cellphones may get half of the message only, as it is limited to 140 chars.
Erlang - why? after diving into threading in Java for a recent project, I wanted to see other ways of approaching the same problem - recommendations for other languages with powerful threading solutions?
I'm not sure a poll is needed. The whole point of Cap 'n Trade is to reduce certain kinds of economic activity, as well as provide new securities for Goldman Sachs to trade. Bankruptcies would not be a side effect.

Job losses are also built in

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/jul/03/energy-job-l...

Workers who lose their jobs if the pending climate change legislation becomes law could get a weekly paycheck for up to three years, subsidies to find new work and other generous benefits

In other words, all the displaced workers will be put on welfare, presumably to keep them from marching on DC.
So locking parts of files will be a file-based api?

Do sound weird.
Haskell. I'm working through http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Write_Yourself_a_Scheme_in_48_H... which is quite a good tutorial.
Solitaire: Man Versus Machine
Nation states are not without utility, but this doesn't mean they are the ultimate form of social organization. Redrawing of European national boundaries along ethnic lines was offered as a justificiation for much of the aggression resulting in World War 2. Strangely, Europe seems not to have fallen into inter-ethnic confusion following the implementation of the Schengen agreement, which did not abolish Europe's internal borders but basically made them fully porous, such that Europeans can now live and work wherever they see fit.

As for your distress over the multi-cultural stew that is modern London, don't you think that just might have something to do with UK's past history of traveling the world, meeting exotic people, and conquering them? Just as you can go to London's Brick Lane and wonder whether you unknowingly took a trip to South Asia, you can go to Mumbai and wonder why so many people express themselves in Victorian-themed English.
Linux, but one annoyance is about 10% of the time I have to manually enable the LAN connection to my ADSL modem. I never had to do that with Windows.

For developing it's great though.
Interesting discussion of a start-up with an idea I would like to apply in my daily work and personal life.

"GreenPrint’s travails are all too common for small technology companies. 'The gulf between invention and innovation is often a huge one that many entrepreneurs can’t cross,' said Scott D. Anthony, president of Innosight, a consulting firm.

In other words, it’s not easy to turn a bright idea into a genuine business."
There's a minimum karma threshold to make polls. That's why we can't do them yet.
Have you looked into scala?
Obviously so many people were blind-sided by the tabloids the first time. He hasn't been convicted of any crime, over 70 police officers searched his home and found nothing, but obviously a lack of conviction doesn't mean anything to you or the media conviction he was given.

The man obviously had a bizarre personal life, in fact his life was outright bizarre from young childhood when their father forced them to perform. So I'm sorry, but when parents allowed their kids to stay at his house unsupervised, the parents should have been under criminal investigation too.

No conviction, no crime. It's essentially how the whole innocent until proven guilty system works, but obviously you don't care that a man hasn't been charged for paedophilia, you just want to call an innocent man one anyway. Kudos on only believing the bad things about people in the media and believing none of the good things.
Erlang - nitrogenproject.com got the best of me one evening...
This is not slashdot - while funny, this comment doesn't add to the conversation.
yeah, tell amazon to remove all their xen-based services.
Objective-C. Quite a big jump from Ruby. :)
Curious as to why I got modded down to hell. It's an interesting aspect of the story that nobody's covering - the fact that while newsworthy, traditional media took forever to address it.
You quoted and linked to the review rather than original source material, and as such you own the selectivity and bias too. The quoted sections do not, in any case, validate your original argument, but only offer partial support for one of your assertions.
If I were you, I'd travel.

I am 26, I now have 1 child and another on the way. If there was anything I wished I had done right after graduation it is travel around the world. Since you don't have an immediate need to jump straight into the work force that is my suggestion. You can utilize the time to figure out what you want to do, perhaps obtain a new idea for a start up.

Once you start popping out kids, get a mortgage and everything else creeps up on you it can be hard to find the time to just go on vacation for a week let alone a month or two.
Urine turned into hydrogen fuel
"I think a fair-er comparison is of Noble prize laureates by ethnicity or country where they were born. You probably will see a lot more even distribution."

Ha. You seriously believe that, don't you? I'm impressed almost. In the U.S., 13% of the population is black. 2% is Jewish. Guess who get Nobel prizes and who don't.

Evolution is a nasty, nasty theory that happens to be true. The magical equality fairy theory is beautiful, full of peace and love, and is wrong and stupid.
hello dpcan. what software do you use on linux for the tasks you mention - contact mgt, cal, todos, etc. Do you sync with other devices like an ipod or cell phone? Thanks.
I am (very slowly) diving deeper and deeper into Ruby.
You might not have enough memory allocated for VirtualBox. That would make it jerky. I give it 1 gig of my 4.

I'm not sure about CPU performance differences between VB and anything else, but it's never been a problem for me.
Good advice. Can't believe how many people purport these books as gospel...
(1) Haskell, because I like functional programming, and this language seems very promising (I first looked at it 10 years ago, but I gave up because the implementations seemed immature. I took another look recently, and I'm amazed by how much it's progressed since then). I especially like the way that laziness and purity enable a concise, stream-processing paradigm through the use of maps, folds, and various combinators.

(2) Lua, because it seems like the Scheme of imperative scripting languages, while still being very practical and hackerish. It also has a neat game engine (Love2d) which I'm eager to try out.
C++, after learning Python as a firstl anguage, going through accelerated C++ then thinking in C++
Somewhat related to this, BackTrack 4 pre-release was made available not too long ago.

While this tutorial is great, there is actually a youtube tutorial which uses SpoonWep. Essentially it is a Java GUI 1-button WEP password grabber which is included with BackTrack 3.
Pirate Bay's Weird New Business Plan
I can't upvote this enough. The book mentioned in the OP is a superb read too, for its portrayal of the context in which this kind of hack took place.
continuing with RK, natch, and patio11, I'd really like to know more about the survey parameters. For instance...

1. Does anyone know which stores were surveyed?
2. Did it include stores that do not carry iphones (Are there such stores in Japan)?
3. how was sampling conducted (e.g. only certain metro areas)?
4. how did the responding stores compare with the overall sample/population? For example, did a disproportionate ratio of stores carrying iphone respond?
PHP and Action Script through Adobe Flex
+1 All you need to learn about money is in this book.
Haskell. I've already written non-trivial applications in it, but there's still so much to understand.
I'm not learning any language right now, but have learned a fair share over the course of the past few years.

My general criteria is not to learn a language that is conceptually similar to something you already know unless there are professional advances to be had there. If all you know is Python, C might be good because it's lower level. Lisp or Haskell or O'Caml might be good because you'll have to program with different paradigms, etc. If I were coming from Python, Ruby wouldn't be my next choice unless I needed it for a job.
It's very tough to actually believe this article has all the facts straight when they suggest Seti@Home is a peer2peer network..... :o
After Effects Expressions, a js-like scripting language for video graphics. I'm not sure if this qualifies though...
My main laptop runs Windows 7 - nearly all development is done on this, compiles using Visual Studio 2008 and Cygwin.
My netbook runs Windows 7 - I do nearly all my social/recreational stuff on that machine. Also it has VGA out and I've come to rely on Win7s projector detection magic for presentations to just work. It's the only machine I travel with.
My top-of-the-range Alum Macbook runs just OSX, got it for xcode, which is gathering dust because most of my dev work is in VS.net and even after months I still can't get into the swing of using OSX.
Machines synced with the amazing DropBox of course.

In serverland, 1 dedicated server (France) and 1 slice (USA) running Ubuntu 9.04 server, the other vps running RHEL; Mono 2.4.2.

I always have a stack of Putty windows open.
Arc (lisp in general)
I was wondering if we were supposed to choose only one option. And I'm flattered by your assumption that I enjoy doing my job more than surfing the web -- it isn't always true, even though I try to work as if it were ;-)
What does a CEO do?
F# -- OCAML has got it all: imperative, functional. Plus with F# you've got a huge collection of ready-to-use libraries
It's very difficult to fire people in most countries. If you've got someone who was never particularly good at their technical job (or hasn't kept their skills current), you kind of have to transfer them to a hands-off position to keep them from damaging anything directly, and the only way to do that and everyone saves face (i.e you don't get sued for constructive dismissal) is to promote them to management.

And that does protect the codebase and the production systems in the short term, in the long term, all the reports they insist people write that don't create any new and valuable knowledge, all the meetings they insist people attend that don't communicate any information or make any decisions, etc, are enormously damaging, not only directly in lost productivity but in the damage to the morale of those who are still motivated.

So most management really is bad, but not because of anything inherent in the management role - because the wrong people are doing it for the wrong reasons. There needs to be much more up-or-out http://thedailywtf.com/articles/up-or-out-solving-the-it-tur... .
you have to have a really high karma :)
ahh makes sense.
I assume this type of poll is self-selecting and that Windows is greatly underrepresented. In a 2005 article, PG states that the ycombinator visitor OS breakdown is as follows: Windows 66.4%, Macintosh 18.8%, Linux 11.4%, and FreeBSD 1.5%

I would love to see the current OS breakdown from ycombinator logs to compare. Anyone?
http://news.ycombinator.com/newpoll, if you have over the karma threshold
Related question for Mac users: Don't you ever view windows in fullscreen? It seems there's no easy way to get windows to fullscreen, except for laboriously resizing and dragging to make it fit with the screen. This is one of the things that threw me off Mac (I bought one that I used as my main OS for about half a year, but I just never really liked it)

So do Mac users simply not like fullscreen windows, do they all have some utility that does this, or am I just missing something? To me it seems like an extreme shortcoming, but I'm sure there's a reason for the limitation.
I agree. I usually mouse-over a link and check where it's being redirected to in the Firefox status bar, but I haven't seen this option for links that have been shortened.

I never really understood it, and would probably click on more links in Twitter and other places if I could see for myself if the shortened link was legit.
Why don't we rewrite the Linux kernel in C++?
Haskell for me too. It's slow going, but it's already making me a better Python programmer in my real work. OCaml/F# are on the back burner too.
I think the simple solution to the H1B program is to have companies biding on slots. When people see companies are willing to pay 10-20k+/year extra to higher the highest levels of talent few are going to complain.

Also, I once worked for a body shop which cared little for talent and just wanted people to fill the spots as cheaply as possible. And unlike at that paperwork this would stop them for using H1B's.
That article irks me as it makes no sense. First, there in fact is very little room for commercial software in the cloud: the clouds are built using either in-house developed tools, open source software, or combinations thereof.

Second, what people run on top of cloud platforms is almost always open source software: in fact, it would be hard to see open source distributed computing projects such as Hadoop and Voldemort gaining much traction without "the clouds".

Third, there's a whole business model for open source software: the software itself can be released free (as both in speech and in beer), while the customer would be charged for the service of running the software on vendor's premises (the vendor nets a profit, while the customer still as they don't have to build out the hardware infrastructure/perform systems administration/customize the software themselves).
No, the message is still limited to 140 chars, for cellphones or browsers, the link handling is done behind doors.
If you wanted to know our preferences, you should have asked what we wish we used. However, I think the question as you stated it is more interesting, since people are quite vocal about their preferences anyway.
> solving an economic crisis through inflation is just the same thing as forcing everyone to lower their salaries

And debts, and bank accounts. If you look at it that way, it's sort of like compressing the part of the economy that doesn't consist of physical stuff.
Bouncing around between PHP, AS3 and Python/Django. Really need to settle on one for a bit.
You're confusing savings (holding debts that someone else supposedly must pay, in this case, central bank debt) with investment.
if you had used the same tone in your first comment that you are using here, you likely wouldn't have been voted down.

now that you've restated it in a calm way, i can see that you might have a point. but your first comment reads like a flame. your own noise drowned out your signal.
In e-book fair, download 2.5 million books for free
Actually I suggest the whole Linux FAQ because of many good explanations to questions like why isn't the linux kernel a microkernel and why aren't the gotos replaced with C style exceptions.

They give a pretty good answer to latter question - Admittedly, all those goto's do look a bit ugly. However, they are usually limited to error paths, and are used to reduce the amount of code required to perform cleanup operations. Replacing these with Politically Correct if-then-else blocks would require duplication of cleanup code. So switching to if-then-else blocks might be good Computer Science theory, but using goto's is good Engineering. Since the Linux kernel is one designed to be used, rather than to demonstrate theory, sound engineering principles take priority.

It is definitely a nice reading on a rainy afternoon
Vote it down and don't make a silly comment. You're just making it worse.
Javascript. I've "known" it for 10+ years, but now I think is the time to take it seriously. The web stack is getting dumber as a lot of UI and logic moves to JS inside the browser.

Databases got dumber in exactly the same way -- do you know or care if your database has good stored procedure support? Eventually it won't matter much what the server is running.
Spinning the Web: P.R. in Silicon Valley
I'm rewriting a card-game-playing environment written in Java. I originally wanted to use one of the Java implementations of Arc, but the low activity level of the forum (and my difficulty installing Rainbow a while back) makes me uneasy, so I'm learning Clojure. Sorry PG.
I have heard this from a lot of H1 engineers - especially ones with a couple of years of experience. I myself was one but never bought this reasoning - though cannot deny there may be some truth in it. My own understanding is that mostly this applies to startup companies:
1) They generally have a harder time recruiting so supply/demand forces them to pay higher generally.
2) Their spending extra on the work visa or residency processing is a way to buy insurance against the employee leaving any time soon(till the green-card is processed which is a period of 2yrs-infinity)
3) They generally prefer hiring recent graduates (and there are only so many US citizen graduates every year). Why they do so? Again I think because of a few reasons (though cannot deny there may not be any truth in these):
a) Recent graduates are cheaper and are hungrier and a lot of the work does not need specialized phds but good computer science fundamentals.
b) Freshly minted MS may not necessarily be better engineers/programmers but are more in tune with the latest tools in fashion which startups tend to use.