skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree, I work in a relatively small company (100 people) and there are a large number of people who are more concerned about the traditions of their functional role rather than the overall health of the business and adapting to market realities. I don't think it is 60% of people, but based on what I've heard from friends who work at places like P&G it isn't too far off.
Just understand you'll be missing some very common python libraries. You could then get involved in porting them over though and get some serious geek cred. Or you may not need them anyway...

EDIT: specifically some of the libs you mentioned. If you have time, I agree go w/ 3.0- you'll know the libs that much better as well if you help port them.
It's over a century old, but the "Art of Money Getting" by P.T. Barnum is still pretty good:

http://www.fourmilab.ch/etexts/www/barnum/moneygetting/
That depends on what you need. In general, I would recommend 3.0. It is more modern and has some nice enhancements and is the way to go in the long run.

With that said, some libraries still haven't made it to Python 2.6 let alone 3.0. For instance, I make use of NumPy which was compatible with 2.54 but not 2.6 the last time I checked.
Even then leaving your money in the bank at a negative interest rate would not be better than having it in a mattress discounting physical theft risks of course.
My key takeaway from RDPD was a confidence that getting rich is not as hard as the typical middle class person is often led to believe. His entire attitude towards money is infectious. That alone makes the book worth the read.

Also that fact that it's a very small book, which means the time investment required to read it is very low. I love little books for this reason.
blah, blah, "fuck", "bullshit", "blah". Btw. the iPhone is a rip off of the Linux based Deeda Pi that was conceived as a concept phone long before the iPhone.
It's possible to get "Don't panic!" engraved into the iPhone, right?
Sometimes the reasons the rest are "kind of skating" is the obnoxious behavior of the managerial classes I'm referring to. Though I admit that I'm speculating about the original post.

I currently work in a large organization.
Sony Ericsson C903 Cyber-shot Review
PEEtroleum: Urine Powered Cars Coming up
OK, it's not pee directly but urine based hydrogen. I love anyways! Your toilet might become an oil well soon!
"...you will never get more than a paycheck..."

That pretty much nails it.

Almost every time I asked someone in a large institution about putting up with something that obviously made no sense, I got the same 3 word reply, "It's a paycheck."
Probably because sticking to the "traditions of their functional role" is exactly what they're told to do and rewarded for.
Great list, I haven't heard of many of them. I don't need 10 CMSs though. The list does not provide many clues as to which one I should choose.
It's all about mindset.

The startup mindset is focused on building something great.

The big company mindset on survival within the organization.

At least that is what many of the founders I have represented have reported back to me after having their companies acquired and after having gotten roped into employment stints with the acquiring company.

In almost all such cases, once the employment period expires, they can't wait to get out.

I am sure this is not any kind of universal rule, but it often happens.

BTW, not endorsing this particular author attitude in particular, which I found off-putting in itself.
Data, Death, and Reality Distortion Fields
This comment sounds funny at first, but it's SO true.

If the business card has an AOL address on it, it's a giant red flag that says "potential problem client" all over it.

My top 8 reasons why an AOL address on a business card MAY mean "problem client".

#8 This person will probably have NO IDEA how to send an attachment. I mean NOOOOO IDEAAAAAA!

#7 Need them to upload a photo to a website? Forget it. Just forget it. "Browse button? Browse what?"

#6 You never know if your email will get through to them or if it will be filtered.

#5 The "Internet" IS the AOL icon.

#4 When on the phone with your client, you will probably hear the distinct sound of a 56.6kbps modem tone when you ask them to pull up their email or website.

#3 They'll ask what "keyword" gets them to their website.

#2 Getting them to a browser to pull up their website first requires walking them through a series of pop-up ad windows that need to be closed.

#1 While walking them through a website or how to send an email, prepare for this statement: "Hold on, AOL crashed, I have to reboot. I think I need a new computer." (no. you do not need a new computer. you are doing it wrong.)

humph.
I first thought this was some business advice crap. However, the article repeated lots of good points.

What you think of life is what you will get from life.
Probably not what you have in mind, but The Wealthy Barber ( http://www.wealthybarber.com/ ) provides common-sense advice for accumulating and managing modest wealth without needing corporate success.
I covered this a bit on the GameRates blog today(http://www.gamerates.com/posts/show/global_recession__virtua...).

With Eve these matters are a bit confusing as you can "role-play" a morally bankrupt character or a thief and such behavior is at times semi-encouraged in the game. Players known this when they sign up for the game. However, when you use your trust within the community to steal from a player-formed bank and then use the proceeds for real life gain it seems to cross an ethical boundary.

I've debated before over the justification for real money trade (http://www.gamerates.com/posts/show/debate_over_the_justifca...) and compared the "War on Gold Farming" to the "War on Drugs" (http://www.gamerates.com/posts/show/the_war_on_drugs__the_wa...), but all of those arguments required that the RMT/gold farming be a sort of "victimless crime" which would not hurt the game or community anymore than if you choose to play extra hours instead of outsourcing that boring playtime to China (boring repetitive gameplay is at anything a game flaw in MMO's as it's expensive to make original unique gameplay that can keep players busy for months/years; and very cheap to make them replay the same event hundreds of times aka "farming").

It seems the thief made the common mistake that just because you are anonymous and online that it is somehow OK to cheat and steal. I mean how many of you have had someone try to cheat you out of something online, but doubt the same person would ever be so brazen in person? It didn't seem like the theif was "role-playing" to enhance the wild-wild-west-in-space nature of the game either. He stole virtual money from a bank he was entrusted with (that players had spent a great deal of time acquiring and valued) and then sold it to a website that spams virtual currency ads to pay some bills.

It is one thing to outsource boring parts of the game to another to player for you, and another to steal from your fellow players and then sell the proceeds to pay your personal bills. If the player who did this was fine with his actions, he should have publicly released his name. However, hiding behind anonymity shows he's probably not that comfortable with his actions "role-play" be dammed.

I know if I ran a google search of his name and this was the top story that came up I'd have reserves about hiring him.
Practically speaking, if you want to leverage a lot of those libraries/frameworks you mentioned, 2.x is the way to go. However, the major syntactical and core differences that break backwards compatibility in Python 3000 (http://docs.python.org/3.0/whatsnew/3.0.html, http://docs.python.org/3.1/whatsnew/3.1.html) should be in the back of the your mind.

After working in a bit of py3k, I've found that "small things" such as using print() as a function rather than a statement comes more naturally than in Python 2.x, mostly because the latter doesn't complain about it.

Other things like xrange()'s departure in py3k as range() becomes a true iterator -- that's something you'll have to be cognizant of.

My advice is if you want to get a large project done, with support from popular and existing frameworks, go with the 2.x branch. If you're whipping up some disposable scripts, practice with py3k. And even if you're not, fire up py3k anyway.

One of the great Google Summer of Code projects this year is the inverse to the 2to3 tool -- 3to2 -- with the forward-thinking intention of making it easier to maintain one branch of code in py3k. It isn't a magic bullet by any means, but should definitely encourage the transition from Python 2.x to 3000.
not half a decade ago? I think you meant 'not half a century', but even that would be wrong (he died in 1955).
yes, like Iceland. Oh, wait...
maybe if you want to get rich your best bet is to write a book about getting rich? Seems to work for schmuks like Timothy Ferriss.
I worked in a London recording studio in the early 90s. One thing many people may not be aware of is how slow the process of recording and mixing is in a studio setting (we didn't do mastering). There was unfortunately a lot of down time for people who might be needed in the studio for a certain task but had to wait around for other people to finish their tasks.

This was also a transition period from the analog to the digital era. Analog gear was still used (such as the tape decks) but sequencers, compressors, electronic gates and other tools were also filling up the racks in the back of the studio. I have to say that they took away a lot of the spontaneity of recording music. Everything had to be matched to a click track and many takes and overdubs were required to get things "perfect". For dance music or songs with a heavy electronic component, this doesn't surprise me, but for rock it seems a little ... fake.

IMHO some of the best studio recordings were the ones that were done "live" with minimal overdubs, such as Husker Du's Zen Arcade and stuff from the early days of rock and roll. And good live performances can really show the soul of a band that may not be apparent in complex, layered studio recordings. I am thinking of The Who's Live at Leeds or that DVD/CD of Queen performing in Montreal in 1981. I saw Soundgarden put on an amazing performance once that really moved me in a way that was different than listening to their great studio records.
Ignore the above suggestion. You don't need a traditional/heirarchical file-system. What you will need is an emulation layer to interface with the outside world.

An object store could work, but I'm not sure what OO language you're using, but I think the single-inheritance model may mess that up...
Tim Ferriss - How to Build a Successful Blog
Benford’s law, Zipf’s law, and the Pareto distribution
It's called a parody, a piece of satire. Look it up.

It's making fun of the modern employment system's aversion to free thinkers (and thereby scientific geniuses).
* but the future OSes simply have to borrow heavily from the best of the current VM implementations: garbage collection, JIT compilation and rich standard library should all be provided by the OS (as opposed to in-process VM) and shared between all processes written in higher level languages.*

Hey, that sounds familiar...OH FUCK! It's been done a long time ago! The Lisp Machines and the Smalltalk machines!

It shouldn't take much convincing to see that this is a damn good path for an OS to down...
Why? What advice does he give that isn't genuine?

From what I remember, the book's premise is about using money to make more money and that true wealth is a derivative of investing wisely. Sure, maybe for you this is a no-brainer, but for the average American and perhaps the average hacker this concept can be life-changing.
Check out "The Millionaire Mind" and "The Millionaire Next Door". The book isn't really about how to become rich. More about the mind set a millionaire has to get rich and stay rich.

http://www.amazon.com/Millionaire-Mind-Thomas-J-Stanley/dp/0...

http://www.amazon.com/Millionaire-Next-Door-Thomas-Stanley/d...
Indeed, versionning is very important. The trouble will be the structure. Sure everything's an object, but how will you keep track of differences in images or text documents? You might need something more fine-grained.
I agree; probably the article is excessively polemicized. I do think the author has a point, but he oversimplifies in making it a black and white, us vs germany thing.

I think the biggest difference is that it seems that in US schools, due to the high risks teachers face from litigation and the various incentive structures, the situation has degenerated to an "inmates running the asylum" scenario. The teachers, simply put, lack the ability to impose some minimum level of order and discipline, and the worst are allowed to run amok to the detriment of all of those remaining in the class. The focus in education in the last twenty years has always been "not leaving someone behind", and of course that sounds at worst anodyne if not downright saintly. Sadly, "not leaving someone behind" is in practical terms often paid for by the good students not being able to pay attention during class or being harrassed by the bad kids.

I think it is probably along this dimension where there is the greatest disparity between the US and Europe. In Europe, at least to my mind, there seems to be more deference to authority, in particular to the teacher. Just as a silly example: in the US, there was a recent supreme court case where some kid had a banner that said "Bong Hits For Jesus" at a school event. The kid was ordered to remove the banner and IIRC was suspended or the like; nothing huge. So he took the school all the way to the supreme court! Aside from the absurd legal waste here, and despite the fact that he lost his appeal, what strikes me is the sense of entitlement. I don't think it would even cross a French or German high school student's mind to try to pull a stunt like that.

On the other hand, US universities are the envy of the world --- and the concentration of US universities in the FT top universities ranking is evidence of that -- and there is no shortage of nerd glorification at these institutions. Also one need look no further than Silicon Valley to conclude that the situation for the US is far from lost.

Finally, I would add that, in respect of high school education, it does seem that in more than a few places Europe is regressing in performance, and for much the same reason as the US and indeed many other countries: we've relaxed the system, made it easier for students, in particular the bad and disruptive ones, with predictable results. Not that I'm advocating a return to harsh punishment, sadistic teachers, militant drills, etc., but I think we need to think carefully about the overall incentives for students and teachers and ask if, in the current constellation, society is best served.
Which often means "I tried and tried to change that thing that made no sense, until I was told that I would be fired if I didn't stop."
I've had blog posts that are a direct result of my interactions with several HN members. HN is a great catalyst for debates. Thus, sometimes I write what I write because of an idea picked up from a discussion that originated here. However, I wouldn't say I'm tailoring my content for HN either, since, generally, I write so that others (i.e. people outside this community) can at least understand what's the topic at hand and its repercussions.
Expono: Flickr, Picassa and the Kitchen Sink
You can't swing a stick on the Web these days without hitting a photo or media sharing service. Some of the most popular ones like Flickr and Photobucket have become an indispensable part of our online lives.
This has been done before...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pointillism

But that was for original artistic expression, and not just recreating something. Surat pre-invented the dot matrix printer, using ROYGBIV instead of CMYK.

I think the dedication of simply copying something is very therapeutic for those involved, I have heard that people need to occupy parts of the brain in order to let other parts do some thinking.

This, however, seems like a complete waste of time.
Suit Over China's Web Filter to Target Lenovo, Acer, Sony
Mixed results for green IT goals
A majority of public sector employees do not know about environmentally friendly IT targets set out in government's Greening ICT Strategy.
I don't understand the author's point. You can't compare a library/system like hadoop to an implementation of that system. Apache Hadoop isn't a business.
what brain regions need glucose to function, whereas others can use acids? from where did you learn this?
Isn't it relevant that you need to use third-party tools to make Twitter usable? The concept of Twitter may live on, but I think we're all just waiting for a better implementation.

Heck, they had to buy another company just to provide search for their own data!
Looks like I'm getting down voted for not contributing anything worthwhile to the conversation.

I'm not a huge fan of get rich books and I wonder how many rich people ever read any of those books.

Also I don't really like the idea of hoarding personal wealth - why is it that the richest in the world seem to often give away their wealth after they have accumulated it? eg Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Andrew Forrest.

I remember reading somewhere about Warren Buffett. He said that he enjoyed the challenges of making money not the money itself. He also mentioned that to be ultra 'successful' one needs to devote oneself completely to making money to the exclusion of all else. Doesn't sound like the road to happiness to me.

From where I'm standing it seems that most people who got rich found something they loved doing and were really good at (the threadless guys are a good recent example). The money was a nice side effect of their passion.
No, if you're a newbie, make things easy on yourself and use 2.6. Once you've got some experience under your belt you'll be able to easily pick up 3.0.
America’s Secret Innovation Weapon: Immigration
After reading this story, I'd like to quote Jack Donaghy from 30 Rock when he said, "If I want to be told something I already know, I'll go read The Huffington Post."

This article complains about how salacious "reporting" sells then plugs her own researched book. It's full of hyperbole like, "If this is where media is going on a book level, magazine level or blog level—I want out." It's also worth noting that in that statement she's talking about the contents of a book she hasn't read.
Asian cultures tend to value education a lot more than Western cultures. What you said about doing well in school also applies to, say, China.
"In the U.S., many of the best and brightest end up in the military or government service."

Would you please care to provide examples?

If you said that the best and the brightest are funded by military and government, I'd agree. After all, that's what DARPA and NSF are for. But I have never met one bright person who enjoyed working for the U.S. military or government. Not one. They all quit their jobs after a while, and came back to academia, or the private sector.
its a deal for them, techcrunch gets to have one "mainstream reporter" that can string a few sentences together and lacy gets to plug her book non-stop to pretty much her targetted audience
I've said it a million times and I'll say it again:

Replace all urls with a "link" enclosed on an <A> tag

<a href="realurl">LINK</a>

No need to reinvent the wheel, it's been there since the dawn of the web.
I've never met a tall person who did anything worth a damn either, but that tells more about me than it does about tall people.
Poll: What OS do you use everyday, or most often?
I am surprised nobody has submitted this poll, it's interesting to know anyway.
I'll go do this right after I get done prematurely optimizing my untested code.
They have the skills to get things done, the passion, and perhaps most importantly, the patience required to make elephants dance (big companies get stuff done). Every time I meet one of these gems, I walk away believing a little more in the human condition.

I really wonder how often these three traits are all found in one person. I have a hard time imagining a person being passionate and able to get things done, but being willing to move forward at a rate mandated by the rest of a large, bureaucratic organization. Perhaps this is the group of people that is competent but also feels a stronger obligation to those they support to have something stable.

My reaction to this is slightly different than the authors: I actually find myself fearing for the human condition. Whenever I meet these people, I find that they are often on the brink of ceasing to care. They'll keep their skills, and keep learning new ones, if only because they are insatiably curious. They'll remain patient, because what they are dealing with at that moment is likely the hardest test their patience will have. But, they'll lose the passion, either because they tire from constantly pushing against the elephant, or because the feeling of obligation will force them to, so that they don't burn-out and potentially leave those who depend on them unsupported.

One might argue that their passion isn't lost, it is just redirected to other things (children, family, other hobbies, etc.). This I have a hard time believing, because I've run into people at small, young companies who are passionate about their families and hobbies, but they are also passionate about their work. These are the people that make me believe a little more in the human condition; they are the ones that have decided that sacrificing their fulfillment, although noble and heavily encouraged socially, has its own risks that are not trivial. It's possible that they can be fulfilled just by family and other hobbies, and their work doesn't have to matter. If they can't, depression will fill the cracks, and will bleed over into every part of their lives, in spite of how much they may claim success in compartmentalizing. Even if they can, treating this as a zero-sum game seems broken to me, if for no other reason than the people I've known who are counterexamples.
" I feel sorry for people who are so emotionally invested in their operating system that they can't see that OpenBSD is the answer"

I couldn't help but smile at the irony of this sentence.
Yes. Actually I read this 2 yrs back and can remember most of it still. The point that you create wealth by making things other want had a great impact.
Survey: The iPhone is No. 1 in Japan
There have been proposed alternatives, at least on the whiteboard level..

http://arxiv.org/abs/arxiv:0903.0694

Disclaimer: I am an author
Very funny! You just put my gut feeling to words ... thanks!
There is no point to lament, take whatever you want, it's not a problem to switch either way.
In my experience, that's almost never the case.
Ah, yes, how could we ever forget that mischevious Ottoman buccaneer contingent that drifted to South America.

I think you mean Tripoli :)
exactly, just you have to keep in mind that you can't allow html posts, while the links should also be able to have the names. I think RedCloth notation for link will do "title":http://link.com if in need for a link name, but if not, then definitively you need to shorten the links somehow.. You don't want the whole screen of a cell phone covered in a single link?
In my experience, that's almost always the case.

EDIT: Just to expand a little. In my experience (and Philip Greenspun would support me: http://philip.greenspun.com/ancient-history/managing-softwar...), managers generally are less up to date on technology than the people that report to them. While they may be more "in the know" about the concerns of the business, it's almost invariably backward-looking, i.e. what got the company this far, and protecting those gains. Add to that the rigors of trying to climb the career ladder, the increased status that makes most people less "hungry," and it's just common sense that change comes from the bottom. Good managers recognize that, and try to manage it. Bad managers just say "No." There's a lot more bad managers out there than good ones.