skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't know if this is a perfect representation of Erik's style, but his rant on XML is an enjoyable read: http://www.schnada.de/grapt/eriknaggum-xmlrant.html

Edit: I posted this because I am mostly unfamiliar with the man's life and work, and enjoyed reading about him.
Thanks.

I've checked out your link, but I'm not sure this would solve my core problem(s). The problem is that even without versioning, a lot of the system is made up of long SQL commands containing subtables and JOINs and such. In several instances I had to optimize the queries. So I wouldn't want to use some ActiveRecord thing or generators. And this is now further complicated by versioning.

Technical issues aside, the fact that everything is versioned makes it hard to reason about the data. Eg. the people in charge of "controling" are always asking me for help. Many times it turns out that there's no problem, the data is consistent, they just got confused by the versions.
This doesn't mean they've failed. In fact, that happening is inevitable. The key is in the quote: "I think we've out-serviced the pirates." Finally, someone pays attention to what Steve Jobs has been saying for years.

It's all in your ways of thinking: The reality of the situation is that someone will aways be able to pirate what you're selling. Okay. Once we get over that hurdle, we can start thinking about how to move forward: you have to compete with free. See, If Company A sells something for $50, and Comapny B sells it for $5, it's pretty common wisdom that A had better have one hell of a good value proposition, as they're charging 10x the price. And if they do, they'll still have customers. Now, let's take those prices and chop off $5 on both sides: Comapny A sells for $45, and Company B sells for free. The same wisdom applies: Company A had better be adding lots of value, because they're charging infinitely more.

Even though EA's stuff _can_ be pirated, it doesn't mean that it will be. If it's easier and simpler to pull out my wallet than pull up the Pirate Bay, the company will get my business. iTMS is a great example of this. High quality audio, reasonable price, no fear of viruses, you can always find what you want without waiting for more seeders, etc. And that's the key. Yeah, it's not that hard to torrent things for us, but what about my grandparents? My parents? My non-technically minded siblings? At some point, your time is worth more than the cost of the product, and that's when you end up paying for things.
> I think this misrepresents the notion behind progressive taxation.

The article isn't about progressive taxation. It's about utilitarian taxation.
This is a big win for Ustream. </captain-obvious>
Here's why: When I go to that link you provided, I get this:

You need the lastest version of the Flash plugin to view this site.

I have Flash installed, yet can't see that site because it's not the "correct" version. The problem with flash is that it is not a standard technology. It does not work in all browsers. It holds users up. It trains them to install software on their computers that could be virus ridden. It's not very good with respect to performance. Video plays much better when optimized to the hardware and Flash -- Adobe in general -- doesn't care about the hardware, they use custom algorithms for everything so their code runs slower than any software designed for a particular platform. Go to a website that offers video in both Flash and, if you are on windows, Windows Media player and then play the videos full screen, one at a time while watching Task Manager's performance tab and you'll see the CPU utilization for Flash is much higher because it doesn't know how to use hardware acceleration features.

It's also another vector for trojans. It's reliant on a single company to support it, when the web is for all of us. Unlike the browser where you could argue IE is as bad as Flash, there are competing products in the browser space, but is there a Flash engine that isn't written by Adobe?

In general, what you'll find is that a hacker will sacrifice good looks for longevity, maintainability, "open-ness," standards, and cost. Adobe's Flash loses on all of those.

Sure, it's pretty and looks nice, but it fails on all the other tests. Furthermore, much of what Flash can do can be done with HTML and JavaScript. It is often the designers turned programmers who came from the Photoshop/Illustrator circles who learned to use Flash first and so they didn't take the time to learn how to do the same things with web standards.

And if you go back far enough, flash was designed and used primarily in the beginning to build Flash Ads to replace animated Gifs and since then, the "flashy"ness of ads has taken off. They slow down the loading of sites. They take over our machines with their slowly running code and generally make the web experience worse for all of us.

just my $0.02
"Founding employees should have similar qualities as the founders."

Why in the world would you want that?
I wouldn't think even two co-founders should be particularly similar. They need to mesh well certainly, but compatibility is often inversely correlated to similarity, especially if you need an A-type leader. Could you imagine a steve jobs starting a company with another steve jobs, instead of a woz?
Admob is a waste of space
doesn't sound dissimilar to my favorite MZORPG

http://www.progressquest.com/
> I like philosopher John Rawls' conception of a "Veil of Ignorance." Rawls would ask: would you rather live in a society with, say, 1% billionaires and everyone else in poverty, or one more evenly distributed around a middle class -- without knowing in advance where you would end up in this society? The answer may well depend on one's level of risk tolerance, but I'd wager that most people wold opt for the latter.

Except that that's not the choice that we're faced with.

Instead, we're faced with "lots of billionaires, a huge middle class, and poor people with 2 cars and 4 TVs" vs "nasty, brutish, and short". Oh, and the former gets better over time much faster than the latter. If you're really going to be serious about the ignorance thing, you should be ignorant of when you live.
Heh, not to fawn all over a YC alum, but I use Dropbox for all my friend-file-sharing. Just pop it into the public folder, get the url, pass that out via whatever.

Maybe FF's is easier, but Dropbox has made it simple enough that it's not worth it for me to play with other solutions.
It was posted recently (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=666611). But sometimes a lot of XML rantiness isn't a bad thing. <grin>
And what's with all these kids on your lawn?
Is Entrepreneurship Really That Easy?
I think most avid readers read well over 5 books in a year. When I've been to the library, I sometimes read two books in one day.
Pitman is right: people are contradictory.

In the Naggum thread the other day I criticized him for polarizing and ultimately damaging the Lisp community. What I didn't say is that I almost always enjoyed reading him, even at his most noxious. He was a master not only of Common Lisp but of English, the latter to a degree surprising in a non-native speaker (Norwegians routinely excel at it but he was over the top). And through reading him I became fond of him, something that by no means always happens. I'm not surprised to hear people say that he was a nice person. People are contradictory.
Um, no.

It has no meaning whatsoever for me to point at you, a number, a tree, a book and say "You are random." What trait are you measuring? What's the context?

Or, if you want to be pedantic, what relation would you use to order a group of people by their respective "randomness?"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_order
Or maybe it's just a good business call. By not giving this guy his Pre, they incurred one hit of nerd rage. But they've ducked out on his followups about how unlimited isn't really unlimited, how megabytes aren't the same as megabits, how 3G speed isn't 2.99G speed, and so on and so forth.

Good point. :P
Godwin's Law in action.
Read this: http://www.maa.org/devlin/LockhartsLament.pdf

Now.
Tools to find brands on Twitter
.ai seems to be a "personal TLD". Most of the websites I've found on the tld (www.ai and nic.ai) are written in first person. The registrar (same person?) takes 3 months to approve accounts after charges before giving you the domain, dns changes are made on weekends, and 2nd level domains (ie hn.ai) are reserved for residents and local companies. I don't have a problem with any of that. I'm just curious how you find yourself in charge of such a setup.
How to change your PC's power supply
A quote:

"The purpose of human existence is to learn and to understand as much as we can of what came before us, so we can further the sum total of human knowledge in our life. "

RIP
As an example, such a game might ask you to tap an iPhone screen 100 times in a minute and then use statistical tests to determine how random those 100 locations are.
Not an arc user, but just curious: with the 'atstrings' feature on, how is an actual '@' escaped?
A book that I am currently reading that I have found tremendously helpful and thought provoking is The Four Steps to the Epiphany by Steven Gary Blank. Most customers don't miss product development, they miss CUSTOMER development.

Disclosure: I am developer, not a marketing used car salesman.

http://www.shelfari.com/books/1344861/The-Four-Steps-to-the-...
Panasonic should have a certification process to allow 3rd party batteries that meet their safety standards.
"Approaches MacBook Speed"? It's 12x slower. That's like saying "bicycles approach speed of TGV" (25 vs 300km/h) when comparing them to walking.
When I read your comment - I was thinking Flash is the like the dumb blond of the internet looks great, a lot of fun but...

I agree with a lot of what you are saying from a programmers point of view. But from a typical users point of view it "seems" to function and look great. Although I disagree with you about longevity and maintainability - I haven't had any trouble with those factors. I also disagree with you that HTML and JavaScript can do what Flash does. Don't get me wrong I love JavaScript but it doesn't do animation anywhere near Flash.

I totally agree with you about cost and closed standards.
And you may be falling into the trap that because it's useful to you, it's useful to lots of people. Again, it's not about "is it valuable", it's about opportunity costs! While you're fiddling with trig you're not learning other more useful things.

Let it be learned when it's actually useful. If you use it in physics, fine, learn it there, when you have context. Not in some abstracted "trig" course.

To be honest, I'm not sure I believe you anyhow. I took a lot of physics, as much as anyone not majoring in it will take, and I did not make heavy use of trig identities, nor did anybody else, nor do I recall a huge number of problems where they would have come in useful, and what problems they might have been useful in were textbook problems anyhow. (In the real world, inclined planes are not all at 30 and 45 degrees.) I think you might just be saying that to score rhetorical points.
Amazing how people take the externality of what Joel is trying to say and yap uselessly about that whilst completely disregarding the main point.
You could defuse the competitive aspects of the game. Or minimize them.

I actually think you are approaching the question from the wrong (and inherently patronizing :-/ direction).

What you should be asking is "How do I maximise fun regardless of skill level?".
My boss doesn't like me wasting my time on a program for one off reports. In fact I had to sell him on the "let me program something for that" because he can't program and doesn't want any major part of our "process" to be outside his understanding. The way I program a project has to do with what technology I want to try (and of course a bit of what fits) and I have tons of fun doing it. Putting off programming my way out of work has more to do with not fully understanding the requirements (ie, why said report should be run and how often) then being lazy or bored.
It must have a different body font, too, because the tracking on page 4 (for example) is atrocious.
It also solves the problem of people keeping their digital camera for more than a year now that they have realized that they don't need twice as many megapixels.

Oh sorry - we don't make the battery for the 2008 model anymore, but the 2009 model with chrome fins (although the same imager) is on sale!
Drive (Courtesy of Marc Andreessen)
Google Banishes Nicholas Carr From The Index
What about dynamic handicapping? In other words, the better you do, the harder the game gets / the worse you do, the easier it gets.

I'll paypal you five dollars if you name your protagonist Harrison Bergeron.
A Million App Downloads For Palm. A Million iPhone 3GSs For Apple.
This seems like user-hostile behavior to me. It would stop me from buying one of their cameras.
Rectangular Sticker: The Perfectly Affordable Promotion
It's been on the xpmath site since 2003. If it doesn't seem legit please feel free to suggest that this post is deleted (I'm not exactly sure if/how I can delete it myself after an hour has passed)
I'm working my way through the Princeton Companion to Mathematics too.

I like it because each topic is written in small digestable chunks by different authors. The change in writing style and view points keeps it refreshing.

Although it's a bit high level, it gives you a taste for a lot of different areas in mathematics -- kind of a mathematical buffet.
I agree. From a user perspective, it seems monopolistic and restrictive, but what about from Panasonic's perspective? How much money do they lose dealing with warranty claims caused by defective 3rd party batteries?
For those who don't care about giving Google their traffic data and aren't already aware of this, Google offers the previously described service.

http://code.google.com/apis/ajaxlibs/
My last job was quite an eye-opener as far as TDD was concerned. I was a C++ developer in my team who also coded in Java as the need arose. The Java team lead would absolutely INSIST that we write the JUnit tests before coding the actual implementation (no such headache for the C++ side). It was a major pain because the time we should be doing "real work" would be used up for writing tests.

We came to appreciate that however when we got into the maintenance phase of the project. Just running the tests quickly would give us confidence that the nothing we did in the current release had broken whatever was existing. We had a bunch of test-harnesses for each Java module in the system. It was the coolest thing I had seen!
A similar analysis might be applied along the dimension of age, following the recent observations, in several places, that despite (for example) Warren Buffett's riches, few 20-year-olds would want to switch places with him. 60 years of life is worth more than $60 billion dollars, to most people, so every 20-year-old is in some sense "richer" than Buffett.

So should strict egalitarians tax the young more than the old? (Don't worry, it'll even out over a lifetime!)
Wandering around Naggum's web site I wonder what will happen to his work when his domain expires?

What will happen to our work when we die?

Is there a place for people already gone where we can go and see their work as they left it when they died? Kind of a graveyard but without the creepiness?

I would like to have access to all the work from [insert hacker name here], if he makes it available, or if he so wishes in his will.

I wish my site would be up (not that I have one) forever for everybody to see, and read, and copy, and do stuff with whatever I left.

Wishing somebody may finish whatever we left unfinished...
I freely admit I have no idea what goes into a trig class. I dropped out before trig was taught.

You are probably right: when I teach calculus, there does seem to be an assumption that students know way too much petty nonsense. But some basics are necessary, even if the computer knows how to compute sin and cos. Students must understand angles and straight lines.

As for tradeoffs, I completely agree. I just think the value of basic trig is ridiculously high.
Amazon: 15.7 million in 1997

Google: 86.4 million in 2001
I don't think the author has any such confusion. He talks about testing to emphasize that he is strongly in favor of testing, but he found TDD as a development model lacking.

He may be a bit slopping in using "the testing world" when he means "advocates of TDD", but his specific claim is that TDD makes it harder to explore design possibilities than the alternative of what he calls exploratory coding.
If my yearly income is 10k, then 10% of it might mean the difference between making rent or not. If I make 100k, 10% of it may mean forgoing some luxury, but needn't substantively impact my overall quality of life.

If I make $100K it's entirely possible that my rent or mortgage is ten times that of a person making $10K, as well as my other costs of living.

If you doubt the veracity of that comparison, take a look back at property prices in the few years prior to 2008 and do the mortgage calculation yourself. It is not at all uncommon to find $5,000 p/month mortgages, and I know you can find rooms to rent for no more than $500 p/month.

So, if you buy the above intuition and want to use taxation to help maximize happiness...

What does happiness have to do with it? No-one in this country is guaranteed happiness. It's not the government's responsibility or right to make people happy, or even to try. Their charter ends at making sure people have the right to pursue happiness, that is all.
But honestly, what do they care if a third-party battery explodes in the user's hand? IMO a better way to deal with this would be for the firmware to record when a third-party battery is used, but not prevent it; in this way, Panasonic could shield themselves from spurious maintenance requests (and lawsuits), while still allowing the camera's owner to ultimately decide how the camera is used.

This isn't unlike Apple's insistence on Apple-branded RAM being used in their machines; if you're having Mac problems, and you have third-party RAM installed, AppleCare will tell you to take a hike.
I'm consistently amazed by how much power the telecom companies have in the US.

I'm living in China, where they use SIM cards, and I just bought my phone and accompanying phone number completely anonymously, using cash only. When I recharge the money on my card, I go to a store and pay cash. If I want a new handset, I just take out the card and swap it into a new phone - keeping my cell phone number and contacts.

The flexibility has even fueled a boom of tiny cell-phone designing companies that make all kinds of innovative creations called 'shanzhai' phones.

Is this just a US thing? Or are handsets locked to carriers in most of the rest of the world as well?
I don't think it's warranty related at all, I think this is all about brand image and marketing. Think about it, when a camera explodes, the press announces that PANASONIC CAMERA EXPLODES! Then in the fine-print a day later they update the story saying it was a third-party battery that was to blame. But no one remembers that, they only know that Panasonic cameras explode and so they stick with Canon or Nikon or whatever.

Sure this sucks for the consumer, but Panasonic has to protect their brand somehow from the nefarious crappy batteries. If I were in charge, I'd opt for the big ugly sticker on the box and in twenty other places, that says using non-Panasonic batteries might cause explosions and if it does you're SOL, or something to that effect.
But what are the more useful things? That depends heavily on what, exactly, you go into. For many people, most of the math they took is never used. But that's not known at the high school level, so a high school education tries to serve as a foundation for further learning. You're assuming discrete math would be more useful to more students than trig. I doubt this is true.

If I had to learn trig my freshmen and sophomore year of college, when I was taking my introductory physics classes, I never would have kept up with the physics. My course assumed a solid foundation in trig and calculus.

I distinctly remember having to use various properties of triangles to solve many of my introductory mechanics problems.
Don't forget that trig pops up everywhere in more advanced math as well. Fourier/Laplace transforms anyone?
Product Liability Law in many jurisdictions requires manufacturers to correct problems when they become known. Some jurisdictions require the correction for already sold and shipped product (Hello, this is Panasonic. Send your camera in for firmware update.) Other jurisdictions only require correction for new sales (Those cameras will merely ship with the updated firmware).

In any event, recording when a third-party battery is used does not shield a manufacturer from liability. In fact, it will be excellent evidence for the Plaintiff that the manufacturer knew of the design defect, and failed to correct it. Furthermore, the manufacturer failed to adequately warn the consumer. Two counts lost by Panasonic.
Dropbox is one of those products that's so good it doesn't get nearly enough hype. I can't think of any service I've ever used that was any better or more flexible. It's my all-time favorite app.
Collection of Naggum quotes:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=152312
Curious, the search http://www.google.com/search?q=roughtype.com

Brings up all sorts of URL's that contain the string roughtype.com but are not the site itself.

It's frightening, especially since we have no way of knowing what else is being filtered out and for whom.

I would tend to give the big G the benefit of the doubt; it's a mistake or he got on the wrong side of the algorithm, or his site was infected with malware. (that last one does happen see http://blog.oddhead.com/2009/06/22/un-hacking-my-blog/ )

But still, it is the reputational equivalent of logging in to your brokerage account to find out it's empty.
So, does being "more random" equate to winning or, losing? What would be the point of playing such a game? It seems that most games ARE geared towards people with more thinking/reasoning ability in some portion of their brain. They appeal to our competitive instincts.

A simple game as you describe, setup just so that everyone can feel equal, sounds like it would be very boring and unengaging to me.

This board game was designed so that it was fair and engaging overall across players of different ages and abilities. I still think that someone who was particularly daft would not find themselves any more successful at this game though...
http://www.wired.com/gaming/gamingreviews/magazine/17-04/mf_...
So now "Fan" pages work essentially like Twitter accounts in terms of letting people follow and receive updates. I wonder what they'll do for normal profiles, where you can't look at a person's feed without their accepting. If they figure out a nice solution, then they may have done away with my attention-whoring friends' need for services like Identi.ca, which they use currently to push both to a private profile and to a public Twitter account.
No way to know for sure, but it most likely occurred because of this: http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2009/05/for_whom_the_go.ph...
The intention is explicitly to provide a commentry, overview and connections between topics. It would not be good use of anyone's time to duplicate a lot of work that's already out there.

Specifically, I'll be looking to create skims of topics with insight, then point to deeper treatments elsewhere, then provide some examples for people to get their teeth into to confirm their understanding. It's the links, and the dependencies, that I'll be covering.

Thanks for this comment - it's resonated with my thoughts. Being wiki-like, though, I think can be made to work. There will be controls.

Work to be done on that aspect, which is why it won't simply be a wiki from the start.