skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There is no message in this post, no "good points" (to a point). Clearly the writer has no experience of Chinese culture or has ever really been there (I know its satire - but the point is to make a point, no?).

Considering cultures in Asia/Africa (possibly even South America) from a Western perspective will always lead you to draw conclusions such as "slave labour" and "abuse".

Now, I'm not going to deny for a moment that such things do go on - but not in quite the same way and on the scale certain people wish to imagine.

Anecdote from my university course: our dept. was open 24/7 (even on Sundays if you had a special pass). I would regularly walk past the lobby at 1am and see the Chinese continget (there were many on my course) still working there. We tried to get some to come to a pub once and they didnt really get the whole relaxing/chilling out thing.

It was an interesting insight into the culture - and when I was lucky enough to travel in some of the less well known areas of Asia you see it in even more detail. Greater thabn 40hr weeks are not borne out of the manufacturers getting more out of the labour. It is borne out the culture (and, yes, they took advantage of it).
Hate Driven Development
I'd be willing to bet we hit cold fusion long before we get it together to use today's forms of clean energy.

Something about this article doesn't seem right. $20,000,000 provides solar for 12,000 people? So it costs about $1700 a person. They must not be using air conditioning.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hxX_Q5CnaA
The link to the video.
doubt it's intentional
Lisp outside the Box (O'Reilly book)
Pissing on Jeff's coding ability became passé when he put out the best programming Q&A site out there. You need new material.
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Attractiveness should be totally uncorrelated to intelligence

I'm not sure that's true - attractiveness is in a large part about facial symmetry, which is a proxy for "good" DNA.
This is only true if the bar is rising at a pace regardless of increase in participants.

In reality, increases in trade raises the bar faster for everyone, often so much that it offsets the drop from the increased competition.

So say both country A and country B are increasing at 10 moon units per year. Country B trades as a net exporter with country A, and takes 1 moon unit per year from country A. However, the increase in economic activity boosts 2 moon units per year for everyone. Now country A is increasing at 11 moon units per year, and country B is increasing at 13 units per year.
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They should fix their frontpage if they want to impress international users. I was thoroughly unimpressed when I searched for my last name ('grytøyr') and saw that it became 'gryt?yr' and included search results for 'gryt'.

However, searching for the same from the result page works, so it appears to be just a charset bug with the frontpage (which I’ve notified them about).
It's really just a ploy. You see, as people buy LOLmagnetz, more money gets donated to our local SPCA, which can save more cats and dogs, only to have them get adopted and create more pet owners, who will naturally be inclined to... buy LOLmagnetz.

Ta-da!

Admittedly, this just arose from a desire to create interesting stuff people wanted (it's such a calculable way to know someone likes what you've created). I suppose it's not far from the YC maxim.

We're in a lucky place because we don't need to do this to pay our own bills, so we can give it all away. But this element came from my frustration with how stale fundraising has become for most non-profits. People have become desensitized/jaded/bored by the typical plea of "help X, give $Y." Offering a product someone wants even without possibly knowing of the charitable implications (and I have anecdotal evidence to show that many don't know this about in our products) means a unique fundraising channel for the non-profits that benefit.

If I had my druthers, more people - especially nonprofits themselves - would copy not just our products (hehe) but also the model.

Oh, and as for caring for people, I am an avid believer in the great affect it has on business. But here's the best part, the bar has been set so low that you don't even need to care, just don't be a dick. Or put inversely, be reasonable and kind.
Microsoft is the FSF's arch-nemesis. It doesn't matter what they do: it must always be wrong, as it is their very existence that defines the FSF. The hate must survive.
raised left eyebrow Does anyone care about Windows users?

If you're doing any heavy development with a set of open source tools on Windows - I don't know it just seems like nonsense. Dual boot, vmware, virtual box, hackintosh, whatever means necessary, but it's always been my fundamental belief that I work in an environment as close as possible to what I'm deploying to. You're just creating headaches for yourself otherwise.

And if this is headed towards any kind of production/hosting thing, you - or someone above you - are making a series of pretty poor decisions. I'm not sure there is any other way to put it.
Does that matter? Those users who do care should get the support they can expect if management claims to be committed to Windows, regardless of how many they are. It's a simple matter of putting your money where your mouth is: if you care, you make sure you have people who can support Windows and like to take responsibility to bring it up to par with the other platforms, otherwise you make it clear that Windows is a second-class citizen and you should be prepared to get a poorer-quality product with less support.

From a short-term management perspective it seems better to have just the promise of support than to have nothing at all, but in the long term you're sending a signal that MySQL on Windows isn't to be taken seriously, and that you don't want people who are committed to Windows as customers. That's as fine a business decision as any, but then it's cheaper to cut out Windows development altogether than to go about it halfheartedly.
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It would come down in cost with economies of scale, and improved production techniques, and... in 20 years, it would be out of patent.

I think there is a moral dilemma when someone creates something immensely valuable, but wants to be paid for it. But... wouldn't a world in which people didn't get paid quickly become rotten? And is it any different from people needing money for life-saving surgery (because the surgeons, hospitals and suppliers all want to be paid). See also the pied piper.

Factual content: there's a camping device for purifying water with ultraviolet light http://www.steripen.com/ but it just kills things, and won't remove salt or arsenic.
If you're interested in these topics, I highly recommend a couple of books by philosopher Daniel Dennett: 'Consciousness Explained' and 'Freedom Evolves'.

His way of reconciling determinism with free will goes something like this. Assuming determinism, then we are living in one of a huge number of possible universes. As limited intelligences, we have no way of figuring out exactly which history we live in, and so no way of accurately predicting the future. That's the free will we have -- the ability to 'play the game' and participate in this deterministic world, using our limited knowledge to try and understand what's going on; and how we can affect it, within the rules of physics.

Yes, this means that we don't have total free will in an unlimited fantastical sense; and, from the point of view of an all-knowing being who knows which history is the real one, all our actions are predetermined. But for all practical purposes, our participation as information-seeking, decision-making agents embedded in this elaborate ball game gives you all of the usual qualities that we worry losing with the loss of 'real' free will -- culpability for our actions, for example.

Even if you're not convinced by Dennett's position, the books do give useful ways of thinking about these problems, and go a long way towards removing the baggage that has accumulated around concepts of 'free will', 'determinism', 'responsibility', 'consciousness' and so on, so that one can reason about these ideas with more pragmatism.
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I can't think of one good reason why you would use MySQL on Windows. I know this seems trollish, but it's the honest to goodness truth.

Either way, it's not likely Windows is all that significant in terms of MySQL usage or you'd be seeing more activity and movement on that front. And Windows developers aren't really all that open source savvy yet either ...
I suggest that Windows users ask for a refund. There's lots of commercial db software out there.
[Ask HN] Does anyone have examples of good site introduction videos?
We're just getting ready to start planning and thinking out our site's introduction video and want to get a look at as many good examples as possible. Problem is we all know we've seen them but are drawing a blank at actually remembering any of them.

The only one we all seem to recall is goodbarry's. Can anyone share some good examples of videos that do a good job of introducing a site.

EDIT:

Just found 37signals' Highrise HQ's video. I especially like the use of background music:

http://www.highrisehq.com/#videos/guided_tour
if third world countries raise Internet Bandwidth and Speed and broaden the internet culture
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I think Kamen is wrong for dismissing a video game (or any kind of software project) as frivolity. I'm not sure that giving a water purifier to a starving village is necessarily "better" than a video game that provides millions of people with a few hours of entertainment every day. I tend to be wary of people who rush to grab the moral high ground.

I think it's noble that he choose to dedicate his genius to helping people, but there's no need to belittle the work of others.
A reasonable position to take. But if it's the case at MySQL, Windows should not be a supported platform and they shouldn't ship binaries.
Some of these "violations" are good ideas in some contexts. Tom Duff has written a pretty good, clear case for "single entry, multiple exit" in the form of multiple conditional return statements in a function. And Rob Pike has made a pretty clear case that this:

for(i=0 to 100)
array[i]=0;

is better than this:

for(elementnumber=0 to 100)
array[elementnumber]=0;

But that involves variables named with 1 or 2 characters.

The rest I pretty much agree with, except in very unusual cases.
Are you a Xoopit or a Zappos?
What kind of startups are you building? Are VCs designed for deals like Xoopit? no
I trump you all with my webapp: Nihilism!
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One thought that got stuck in my mind after reading the article: use Mono and you risk being sued like TomTom was sued for using VFAT.
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With his track record, I would hardly be willing to take his advice about the future.
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But you assume _everyone_ is deploying to a Linux and a server environment. What if you are writing a desktop app: a poker assistant, a contacts deduper, whatever. Some datasets strain the usual embedded dbs, and MySQL would be great... if it worked consistently on windows.
It's what bensummers said above: it's not whether MySQL on Windows is a good idea at all, it's why MySQL management implies that it is by claiming to support it.

You're probably right that there's no technical reason to use MySQL on Windows, so the only reasons left are management reasons ("our code monkeys can install whatever they like as long as it's on our trusted Windows (tm) machines"). This explains why the technical support for MySQL on Windows sucks, while the management support is prominent...
The comments are very interesting.

See also:

part 2: http://paidcontent.co.uk/article/419-interview-christina-dom...

BBC story on transcription: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8163511.stm
Fingerprints to lose relevance?
See also: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=719311
Download WAMP and you can use MySQL on Windows with no-problems. It can also run as a standalone Package. You can also download the Designer and it is ALL for FREE!
More focus on typography and less focus on graphics continues to be the trend.
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Dean Kamen has a track record that is typical of any serial inventor, some hits, lots of misses. He sometimes is way ahead of the curve and manages to get it right, most of the times it goes nowhere.

Still, he's better off than most of us and he's living proof that inventors don't need to die penniless.

Whatever he's saying, there is always some little gem in there that you probably hadn't thought of. The world is a -much- better place with him in it, an interesting and productive person and with a reasonably nice personality.

Truely an original and inspiring figure for anybody that likes to invent things or that dreams of improving the world.

Here is a picture of his house by the way, I've never seen anything quite like it:

http://farm1.static.flickr.com/55/119467546_72bf35b18c.jpg?v...
The point was ... not to guess their sentence (they said what it was).

Ahh, I missed that!
That makes sense in terms of the Avalanche Effect - cheers for the knowledge
The segway was a 'miss' pricewise and there are lots of other things wrong with it, but it is hardly the only thing Dean Kamen invented, chances are you know someone that uses his main invention (the 0 contact dialysis pump) regularly.

The segway would have certainly sold more if the price had been lower, I thought that given the parts in it it should not have cost more than an electric bicycle but I think it is fine for him to charge for it whatever he wants.

The market proved to him that it was too expensive, and that puts it right up there with the Sinclair C5 (another one of those characters).

I'm sure that lessons were learned.

Phenomenal pre-launch buzz around the segway by the way.
Of course being buddies with someone you're attracted to can also lead to sticky situations, cf http://xkcd.com/513/
They probably become the teacher.
Average quality of life could do with some definition.

It's a pretty broad statement. If it means getting a solid education I'm with Kamen, if it means having access to information then I don't. If it means getting food on the table then the jury is still out. It's hard to make such statements without further qualification.
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I don't understand the connections the article is trying to make. It seems to be about improving prescriptions based on metabolic profiling, which makes sense. However, I've never had a doctor take my fingerprints in order to prescribe medicine, and I'd surely walk out with haste if they tried to.

I thought that the point of taking fingerprints was that they are something people can unintentionally leave behind at a crime scene. I don't imagine that many criminals urinate over everything just before they scarper, so I remain clueless as to why fingerprints are mentioned at all.
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I've never had EverNote on iPhone work, ever. I spent a week trying to get it to recognise text in various labels on different items, one of its touted capabilities, with a zero percent success rate. I uninstalled it shortly afterward.
There's a big problem with a product when you can't even get through the installer. I've tried 3-4 separate times to get MySQL installed on several different Windows boxes, and the installer has been broken. Eventually, I just gave up and used postgres, which has proved to be a great move in the long run.
Just FYI: You'll likely get better response if you append "Ask HN: " to the front of your question's title.
Alternatively: why aren't more Windows MySQL users submitting patches?
You'll likely get a better response if you append "Ask HN: " to the title.
Off the top of my head I would suspect the FSF was established well before MS's rise to dominate the desktop.
Yeah, try submitting this again. It's a good question, you just got scrolled off of the new page.
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It's odd for me that PG is the source of this essay. I have a lot less trouble working in shorter bursts now that I'm using a Lisp dialect all the time. When I worked in C, long stretches were essential. I would think working in Arc would make short stints productive as well.
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Please. Half the Windows developers in the world would be out of business if held to this standard. Almost certainly including Microsoft.

MySQL has bugs, but the basic functionality works on Windows. Or so I assume, considering that those bugs don't seem to have prevented tens of thousands of PHP developers from making good use of MySQL when developing their software. (I wouldn't know, of course -- I use Mac OS and Linux.)

I'm sure the bugs are annoying, though. Maybe the people who care about them should get out the GPL source code and fix them. Or maybe they should pay someone who knows how to fix them. Or maybe they should do what just about everybody else seems to do -- calculate the price of options one and two, compare them to the cost of running Linux, and deploy on Linux.

Or they can bang on the table and cry in the hopes that someone will fix their problems for free. Good luck with that.
A few reflections
I use FeedDemon to aggregate about 600 or so blogs and forums - anytime I find an interesting site, I'll test-add it to my reader. I then set up "Watches" for the terms and just let it run.
All of the pages (that I checked) look pretty minimal for me - I'm using links2 to browse at the moment. At least one, #12 IIRC (no tabs!), is using /#pagename for page links; presumably for SEO but giving nothing for non-javascript users.

I guess if you're after an accessible site then you're not going to go with them.
The FSF was indeed created in 1985, a bit before the first version of Windows,
Well, it passed the ego-search test with grace. I almost thought people had given up on a search. There's just so much more you can do than what Google does.
The design is broken on IE8
That's my experience, too. I typically work for several hours early in the morning and late in the evening, then spend between 6-8 hours in the office. Time in the office is always full of disruptions, and I often can't get into any sort of groove. When I'm alone, at home, I'm far more productive in just a few hours.
Are they better than google at search (which is what I think you meant)?

Can they scale what they have to serve the number of SERPs that Google serves? Can they do that cost effectively? Can their algorithms produce as useful results in the face of "optimisations" by 10's of thousands of SEO/SEMs across the globe?

I'm guessing no.

My wife makes the most awesome gingerbread men (and brownies) but that doesn't mean she can put Greggs out of business.

Still props too them, they're doing something awesome.
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Who puts real info in their whois record? Just because I have a website doesn't mean I want loonies showing up at my house.
I find it interesting that you (pg) schedule the office hours for the evening, not the morning. I find that if I have something scheduled at a fixed time immediately after "making" mode, I'm less productive just by knowing I can't tail off naturally. I therefore try to schedule "stuff" as the first thing in the morning.

Or is it tricky to get the founders you're advising to agree (with you, and among each other) on a common definition of "morning"?
This really hit home! Having transitioned from maker to manager over the past couple of years, I was just commenting to a co-worker yesterday that I find it almost impossible to finish the maker-like tasks on my to-do list (mostly writing and reviewing long documents). I've been feeling a lot of guilt about this, but I couldn't see a clear way out. After reading pg's post, I'm thinking about blocking off some afternoons for maker activities. Thanks!
Using vimperator it's impossible for me to execute the Konami Code.
I think Microsoft would be most likely to start firing patent lawsuits at a time where Mono started to gain real traction in the free software community. So, if the community did start adopting Mono as a major platform and developed a lot of good software for it, that is when Microsoft would pull the trigger. So, either way, Microsoft gets what it wants. They limit adoption by holding patents that could be later used against the community, and if it does get adopted they can start suing.

I say this as someone who really likes the .NET platform and think it could add a lot of value to the free software community. But I have to agree with the FSF on this one.
"The day we made the first Segway, the very first one, we drew pictures of enclosed ones. Going back and tweaking things to make them 5% better or 3% cheaper? There are whole industries who know how to do that very well. Our position is been there, done that, did it, changed the world, move on."

He does not seem to understand that cost is the number one factor for all inventions. An immortality pill that costs 2trillion is not going to sell to anyone.
"They sell fuckin shoes! People were selling shoes before them" - dhh.

That quote really struck a chord with me from his talk in 2008. It is quite possibly one of my favorite quotes ever.
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This article has brought me a vision of a (matrix-like) future in which corporations clone and train humans specifically for these kind of call center jobs. Customers, of course, are told that they're interacting with an AI software.