skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Does it need to be so either/or? Not everyone needs to be expert at everything, but on the other hand ignorance creates enormous barriers to entry - illiteracy being an extreme example.

If we focus on educating people as consumers and then gave them discretion on which subjects they are sufficiently interested in to become producers, we might gain more. for example, politicians and marketers abuse statistics on a regular basis, secure in the knowledge that the average person has little statistic knowledge. So we have a small set of people who understand statistics very well, a larger population that are very credulous, and a similarly sized one that think all statistics are BS, an only slightly less ignorant position. You can imagine parallels with rhetorical fallacies or logic and science.

I suggest that students need to be well-rounded enough to assess the quality of information they're likely to encounter or use frequently and then follow their interests from there. So we should probably be teaching financial numeracy, basic statistics and perhaps geometry/trigonometry much earlier, because those are massively important life skills. Algebra, maybe not so much.

When I look at verbal political debates, they seem to me to center around the 8th grade level or even a bit lower. Written debates (eg newspaper editorials) seem to float in the 6th-12th grade level. Then again, I can't help noticing the existence of a TV quiz show called 'Are you smarter than a 5th grader' :-/
(Another day, another hundred apples-and-oranges link-baiting comparisons.)

Mind, Etherpad is great for what it does - real-time collaborative, persistent plain-text editing on the web.
Matt, yours is an opinion that I hold in high regard, and am a frequent reader of your blog. I am not in any way insinuating that the cash out deal for Tony is bad. What I am suggesting is that perhaps this wasn't the deal he wanted. It sounded like he wanted to stay the course and try to go public, which would have yielded a far higher pay day (presumably) and would have allowed him more autonomy than a sale to Amazon.

True he gave up the right to block a sale (I say this without any knowledge of the definitive documents) when he took the money, but I don't think it's too far afield to suggest that Tony thought he was getting a partner that would allow him to see this through.

The VC in this case was most likely acting in economic self interest, but not in the interest of the entrepreneur (or so it would appear).
You're making the assumption that there's no negative externalities--such as climate change or the inability to affordably produce plastics and other durable petroleum products--that can be caused by continued high fuel consumption.
I used to ride my bicyle but now I drive really really fast on my motorcyle for 5 mins. all the while singing "Breakin the law" by acdc as loud as I can.
Getting grade inflation under control would teach that life is not an all or nothing proposition and a business does not have to win the VC/IPO fame lottery to be viable.

A better understanding of probability would create a better understanding of the difference between the mass market and niche markets.

Improving high school education would create better educated students, who would make educated decisions.
I'm sure he's just calculating (average media cost) / (average time spent consuming media). I'm sure he's well aware of the flaws in his argument -- that watching a movie in the theater is not the same as watching at home and that consumer pricing is highly irrational -- since his company relies on these facts to extract the maximum amount from each consumer.
I admit I'm a very pro-capitalism type of guy and I indulge in many excesses that I should not take for granted, and yet do.

But I absolutely refuse to feel anything but joy and elation when I consider the miraculous tools I have available to me that allow me to complete works undreamed of by any generations previous.

It may naive, but I have to believe that if we are to care for the children of Ghana, we have to make more of ourselves, not less. To put it another way, would I know anything of Ghana's plight were it not for my shiny electronic computer and its connection to the miraculous interconnected network of shiny electronics?
Intel Forces OCZ's Hand: Indilinx Drives To Drop in Price
I'd appreciate it if tutorials on regex would use such methods.

Sorry, but it still hurts this noob's brain to try to decipher (let alone write) regex. ...and I feel really bad about "cookbooking" by cutting and pasting someone else's regex solution (even just for checking validity of an email address) without making sure it makes sense to me.
The guaranteed return is in the interest rate that their security undoubtedly had...prob around 12% to 15%. In the event of a sale, the liquidation preference creates a scenario where the equity is being treated like debt - their money comes out first, and does so with an increased return. If they invested $100 with a 12% paid in kind interest, after 1 year, that's $112, and with a 3x liquidation preference, that's a $336 return for a $100 investment. If the sale of the company was under $336, the VC gets a guaranteed return, and all of the capital. It gets even worse over time. With a seven year horizon and the same return and liq pref, the sale price would have to be greater than $663 for the preferences to not come into the decision tree.

People cry foul over the payday loan places, but no one is crying foul over a 3x liq pref. 1x is palatable, but 3x (or even 3.5x) is crazy.
Those statistics are from Wellesley, a women's college. It would be more fair to see statistics from a coeducational college.
How to Make Phone Calls from the Command Line
Rather use time estimate * pi. Always worked for me!
I'm not saying you should pretend to be a bigger company, but there's a huge gap between pretending to be bigger and more professional than you are and running a scam.
Unless you count the recent cover of the "New Yorker" - done on an iphone!
I'm going to guess he meant clisp, clojure has a page specifically stating it doesn't do OO.

(though of course with tuples and multimethods...)
You don't know the teacher knew; all you know is that he sorted the notes into two piles. You don't know if the piles were correct. Not sayin' he was wrong. Just sayin'.
Not to be overly glib, but the #1 "Startup CTO mistake" you can make is having a CTO. Even on paper, the CTO is an architect's role --- which you don't have time for. In practice, it's a place to put founding developers out to pasture when they burn out.
I find it strange that TechCrunch mentions Google as a competitor but not SubEthaEdit, which is clearly what inspired Etherpad in the first place.
The VC in this case was most likely acting in economic self interest, but not in the interest of the entrepreneur (or so it would appear).

This is a far cry from your headline that VCs "hate" entrepreneurs. VCs have a fiduciary responsibility to act in the best interest of their LPs. The best VCs work to align the interests of all parties involved, but when they conflict, the VCs have a duty to act in the best interest of their investors, just as entrepreneurs have a duty to act in the best interest of theirs. Using phrases like "VCs hate entrepreneurs" is beyond sensational and distorts the relationships and responsibilities of all parties.

For the record, I'm not a huge fan of the VC model, but for entirely different reasons.
HootSuite lets a multi-person social media team manage tweets in a web based app that doesnt need to be downloaded (I'm a user). This can actually be a real business, unlike, oh, 90% of the twitter apps out there. Just because most of them are toys doesnt mean they all are.
Thanks for the feedback! The dilemma with links to individual pages is that we allow arbitrary scrolling, and we don't want to create a history entry for each item as you scroll (would break back button). A possible solution would be to have scrolling snap to pages.

Re: Font, What version of Firefox is she using?
It's the other way around. Partial commits terrify me in theory; in practice it's really easy to work out which lines you want to commit and which lines you don't, and having a clean history is really really nice.

And since you've got both "git commit --amend" and "git rebase -i" to hand, it's trivial to later on fix up any mistakes you do make.

Honestly, having a clean history is an enormous win - it far outweighs the minor cost of making the odd wrong but easily-correctable-after-the-fact commit.
Assuming we're merely in a down market.
Which is the standpoint which I categorize as 'denial'.
Asking girls out and getting rejected is like being repeatedly being punched in the face. But not asking at all is like living in a sensory deprivation tank.
VCs, if they sit on the board, have a fiduciary responsibility to the shareholders - all of them. If they took a deal that benefitted themselves to the detriment of common shareholders, well, draw your own conclusions.
We use etherpad for allowing candidates to write code during phone interviews. We love it, and would never go back to using Google Docs for this (what we use to do before, and what I did when I was at Google).
Woah!! + many internets, and I wish I could upvote you twice. I work in this area (kitchen TV right now) and had heard of the project a while back but forgot about it - this looks superb. The popular commercial alternatives (EP/Movie Magic and Gorilla) are made of fail, and I'm not such a big fan of Final Draft either.

After randomly dumping a bunch of day job (unscripted TV location plan data) and personal (2 feature scripts) into it, you've got yourself an evangelist.
I really enjoyed the distinction between languages based on turing machines and languages based on lambda calculus. I'd had a fuzzy idea of the distinction before, but this article set it out clearly.
I listen to podcasts, Humanities courses found in TunesU, or French lessons also via podcast, depending on my mood.
Search for older threads here, theres great recommendations there;
A couple from my ipod: Hardcore History, The History of Rome, Philosophy Bites, French Cafe.
Such live email addresses are very valuable to spammers. So this feature is susceptible to abuse by spammers providing the unsubscribe functionality, but only prioritizing the attempted unsubscribers higher in their mailing lists.

Google (or any other large e-mail provider, for that matter) could significantly decrease the value of an unsubscribe request to a spammer by automatically sending unsubscribe attempts every time an invalid e-mail address is hit with an e-mail with such a link. If spammers can't assume that an unsubscribe response means the e-mail address is live (and further, if the likelihood of a Gmail unsubscribe being a dead address is very high), then the scam no longer has any value to them, and they'll just stop doing it.

...in which case, it's still a useful thing to do, because it helps legitimate companies prune their e-mail databases of garbage addresses.
Cross selling isn't the primary source of distraction / clutter on most shopping sites. I think we could easily add it to the inspector panel that comes up when you click on an item.

Thanks for the nice comment!
How the Swedish Pirate Party Platform Backfires on Free Software
Note to self: next time you're debugging a twilio script, use their free test accounts.

The only thing worse than 2 days of debugging is knowing you have been bleeding cash as well. I had a broken asterisk script rape-dial my toll-free twilio account :-(

Having said that, the service is PERFECT. They nailed every aspect of it down.
Yes! Microtasking is the enemy of procrastination. When I feel like procrastinating (99.99% of the time?) and nodding off, I just tell myself, - I'll go play this game but first I'll let myself know what exactly I'll do after I get bored with procrastination. And so I write something like:

1. Pull init code from old repository.

2. Find function that accepts the data.

3. Insert init code into the class.

4. Debug and see if it works.

5. Write callback for accepting data from TCP.

6. Link callback to init.

7. Refactor.

Then, as I have successfully broken down the huge (2-4 hr for me) task into 20-30 minutes tasks I go and run, or swim, or play 3d shooters (love Tribes 1). Interestingly, while I do that, my brain subconsciously works on the stuff from todolist and when I get back and look at the tasks it's extremely easy to get started, plus, I got a chance to think of a better way (if exists) to do stuff.
okay, here's the argument as I read it:
1) functional languages are made of lambdas
a) when they aren't made of lambdas, it's "just an optimization."
2) non-functional languages aren't made of lambdas
b) when they have lambdas, it's just "style"
The netbook idea isn't even new--it's just a new word for "subnotebook".
Your mission today, should you accept it…
Small nitpick -- Python doesn't require immutable objects for dictionary keys, it just won't work correctly in some cases with mutable keys.
I didn't say scam - but it does come off as dishonest and misleading. If you have a smiling support guy on staff, yeah, by all means, put his photo up on your support page - I appreciate little human gestures like that. But stock photography in its various common internet forms is just laziness.
All true. Ardour and Rosegarden are better as far as multi-tracking goes, but still. The killer app (but not open source) in this space is Reaper, which runs on anything, 32/64 bit, free to use and cheap to buy, yadda yadda. For real work I use Adobe Audition.

There is a load of fabulous OS stuff out there for hardcore geeks, from PD to Jack. But for those who are seeking free-as-in-beer software to get things done, open source is not the way to go. It's even worse with video - I hugely admire Cinelerra, but would not dream of using it for anything important.
Looks like it has a lot of potential. I wouldn't be scared of google wave, the wave server could easily be a backend for this. Let's see how it scales, join my pad http://etherpad.com/Lrg64lFCKU
Web Design is a Journey
This strongly reminds me of listening to the first couple of lectures of SICP.
Something's pretty broken with Firebug...
When people have their basic needs met, they will almost certainly start doing things like playing video games.
Here's a simulator for it:

http://www.davidsharp.com/baby/
how about exchanging certificates in person?
Last time I looked almost all non-Mac high-end PCs suffered from "Klavierlack"-Syndrome. I don't know how it translates into english, but it is that cheesy shiny coating.

There are competitors who can create good high end PCs, but at the moment they suffer from a severe case of bad taste. Maybe most producers being Asian doesn't help either - nothing against them, just the tastes seem to be different.
You're talking past each other.

You're talking about what is the case. He's talking about perception. If your site has any of the same signals of an illegitimate site, then you're in trouble. He has no reason to give you the benefit of the doubt and spend enough time poking around your site to convince him that you're legit.
An 18-Minute Plan for Managing Your Day
Gas Buddy is missing too.
The Porsche/Camry analogy is slightly flawed, because it doesn't take into account the effect of OS adoption and app availability.

It's more like the choice between a hydrogen Porsche and a gas Camry. In that case, even if Porsche are content to sell a few, high-margin vehicles, they will have to worry about whether the model is sustainable given that if customers can't find a place to fill it up, they're not going to buy one no matter how nice they are.
Just so everyone knows, I sold 100% of the PCs in the >$25,001 market.
I've had some time to perfect the art of commuting, London style. My first comment is that your 20-25 commute sounds quite pleasant, I'm lucky to make it in 45 (although this is, of course, a function of where I chose to live).

Commuting essentials for me are the iPhone, usually with some TV episodes on, and obviously a bit of music. I have found a good book to be the most engaging activity...newspapers or articles can be a bit too flitty; you need to be properly engaged for the "gloss over" the commute.

Having tried the RSS catch-up idea, I would advise against it, as you arrive at work/home and all those items you've trawled through are still marked as unread.
Try this:

Functional programming languages have an underlying model based on function composition (with one argument functions, etc.). To the extent that they have arguments with multiple functions, etc., it's ultimately just syntactic sugar and optimizing for common cases - While nobody generally writes the low-level "lambda calculus virtual machine language" stuff by hand outside of academic papers or bootstrapping, Scheme's "let" is implemented in terms of lambda at compile-time. (Scheme without set! is representative.)

Imperative languages have a fundamental underlying model of cells in memory and sequential operations that modify them, branch based on them, etc., including an instruction pointer specifying where instructions are currently read. (C is representative.)

Intuitively (and without busting out the Greek letters): compare languages for which functions are a list of expressions, and return the value of the last, versus languages for which functions are a list of statements executed sequentially, the last of which can optionally return a value. A lot of other issues are ultimately due to how that choice directs default behavior. Even when a language has the amenities to borrow the other's tools, the defaults channel common usage.

Likewise: Relational databases are ultimately based on the relational model, even when parts of SQL fill in conceptually irrelevant details for sake of performance; Prolog is based on backtracking and Horn clauses, and well-structured Prolog can be reasoned about in terms of them, even when cuts are used to avoid wandering about needlessly in known dead ends. The ultimate result would (eventually) be the same. Both models are fundamentally different from pure functional or imperative programming, as well, and the languages built on them are as different as Erlang is from Smalltalk.

I'm self-taught and not a mathematician, so I couldn't give a really exhaustive or formal analysis of the distinction -- probably the best way to understand it (and learn quite a bit else, PS) is to work through the exercises in SICP and CTM. The second chapter of SICP includes Church encoding (http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book-Z-H-14.html...), among many other things. SICP covers functional programming quite well, but CTM makes the fundamental differences between the different programming models and their strengths and weaknesses clearer.

You can use functional idioms in imperative languages, but they may lack features such as tail call optimization or garbage collection, which mean that you're working at cross-purposes to both the semantics of the language and the cases for which its implementation has been optimized. Whether this means attempting to do so is actually infeasible (e.g. stack overflows in Python) or just slow and/or verbose depends on the language. Likewise, modeling problems in functional languages that are intrinsically better-suited to imperative languages can be messy and confusing.

(OO is a completely different direction, but as people have wildly inconsistent ideas of what it actually refers to, I'm not going there.)
ECommerce Considerations
Let's approach this from another angle. Lets say you have two equal founders, one business guy and one tech guy. Then let's say the business guy becomes CEO. What title does the tech guy have? What are the tech guy's responsibilities? Let's say the company is successful, and now the tech guy is managing 10 engineers. What are his title and responsibilities?

Maybe the CTOs you've meet have been useless, but it's obvious you need a Cx0/techie-founder kind of position.

For another take, See Eric Ries: http://startuplessonslearned.blogspot.com/2008/09/what-does-...
You can have both, you know: you use git stash/Mercurial attic to shelve the parts of the change you don't want, test the result, commit, then reapply what you stashed. You get a clean history, and you can easily verify your source code works. This solution notably does not involve explicitly exposing the dirstate to the user.
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Well, technically the requirement is to implement both __hash__() and one of __eq__()/__cmp__(). But Python fudges this a bit in how it handles user-defined types.
Wow, if you actually look at the hardware is it really that high-end?
Cringely has an interesting take on the relationship between Gates and Jobs and how they perceive each other.

"In Steve's mind, he has the best of everything. Apple software is cooler than Windows will ever be. Palo Alto, where Jobs lives, is trendier than Seattle. Even Jobs' plane, a Gulfstream V, is cooler than Gates' Challenger 604. It goes on and on. Gates has never even considered this latter point, but I'll guarantee you that Jobs has, and he revels in it."

http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2002/pulpit_20020110_0007...

So, no, it is not clear at all that Steve believes that Gates is more "successful" than he is. Furthermore, it is no longer insane to imagine that, depending on how long Jobs health holds out, he could presiding over Apple one day with a higher market cap than Microsoft (consider how Apple surpassed Dell in market cap a few years back).
Well, maybe LISP stuff is moving out of the "doesn't sell" category.
I think it's pretty clear if you want something without the viruses/spyware and is less annoying you get a Mac, as long as you can afford it. If you are short for money you end up on a Windows PC. Or at least that is perception amongst the general public.

I don't think Apple have any interest in selling something at lower price points, because like Sony, Porsche etc. their brand is of a better quality product which of course should cost more.

SGI, Sun, HP all used to sell high end workstations at the top the market (~2-20x more than what Apple charged at the time) - that market got eaten by PCs when they couldn't differentiate anymore. Unlike those high end machines, Apple has no performance advantage over PCs. Apple's only real difference is the OS.

Apple's emerging threat is Linux/Open Source, which has many of the same advantages OS X over Windows does and of course was good enough for Apple to take a kernel, browser and printing system from. Linux/Open Source doesn't have to be better than OS X - it just has to be better than Windows and good enough that people don't want to spend extra on a Mac.

Edit: this is classic "The Innovator's Dilemma": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disruptive_technology
We Learn to Grow Crops in Saltwater
We will need to, to survive
But there are places to fill it up. A common sentiment I run into when I tell people that I use a Mac is that people seem to think they can't do the same things on a Mac that they already do on a PC.

Hell, most people don't even know MS Office exists on the Mac.

In fact, after using a Mac for 3 years now I have to say that for a lot of day-to-day tasks, Mac apps beat Windows apps hands down. FTP? Use Cyberduck, it's infinitely superior to any free FTP client on Windows. IM? Adium is classier than any of the all-in-one clients on Windows (including Pidgin). I can go on...

The point is, whatever you used to do on Windows can all be done on a Mac (save for a few domain-specific things like drafting or gaming). And the difference is, Mac developers actually give a damn about UI, which is a lot more than can be said for most Windows apps.

P.S. Whoever decided that unlabeled, nondescript, 16x16 icons lined up in multiple rows at the top of the screen is good for usability needs a serious reality check.