skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you want to use full blown python in a template - use a template tag.

What scenario do you require python in a template? I am a big boy, and the few times I have thought about needing python in a template I realized I need to do a bit more work in the view.

I think it is a great example of protecting 'big boys' from themselves. A year from now when you don't remember how you designed a section of your code you can trivially debug and test instead of trying to sort through logic in the presentation layer.

Also, it makes unit testing much easier having logic stop at the views.
Redbox Sues Warner Unit Over DVD Distribution Terms
That depends on your definition of complete fairness. I see "fair" as including the opportunity for success; fairness becomes a matter of never letting somebody sink into a pit they can't rise from. That can be achieved without much of a socialist bent at all: All you need are nets.

Out of curiosity, why do you think communism is inherently bad? Do you take the angle of "Man is entitled to the fruits of his labor", or is there something else to it?
The economics of tattoos
This is pretty much what I didn't get: only a very small percentage of those critical of the original post would have "made their fortune", only some subset of them during a bubble, and a further subset because of the bubble. Attacking a tiny fraction of your audience that are easiest to criticise is convenient, but not particularly compelling.

What about the other 20-somethings that joined the criticism? The ramen-subsisting founders using a flat as home and office?
Like Electronic Music? You’ll Love Mugasha
Maybe that engineers are better at engineering than managers are at managing?
Of course, that's Firebug not Firebird.
Austrian economics is the antithesis of mathematical economics. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austrian_School#Analytical_fram...

Many libertarians latch on to austrian economics because they already agree with the conclusions austrian economists come to, and it's easy for lay people to understand. Conversely, it takes quite a bit more effort to understand a neoclassical dynamic partial equilibrium model.
What is his point? Either you grow rich in a bubble by sheer luck, or being a worker drone is your only option?

Seems to me he misses a few grey areas in between. Also, if you are not a Computer whizkid, there are other areas where you can succeed. Some people even got rich with a multitrack. (Not that getting rich is the only meaningful measurement for success).

What is the more cynical attitude: to assume people are miserable because they are sheep and just too scared to try anything, or that they are miserable because they are hopeless?
Because it's never, ever worked. There are a lot of ideas that seem smart from an academic perspective but which, when implemented, fail. In the case of Communism it only works if a whole society can manage to bury their natural human desire to achieve more than their neighbor and history has proven time and time again that burying that instinct is not possible and when you try you simply get lethargy.
reminds me of a quote a VC friend used about overly pompous team slides "we care less about where you're from, and more about where you're going"
I thought that when you said "no" you were responding to the whole adverb phrase, not just to the "unlike" adjective phrase. I was correcting that "no"
I agree. It seems far more straightforward to talk to those guys than to do a bunch of guessing as to what they want and write a post on joelonsoftware asking for advice.

If you are sane normal adult you should be able to talk to someone without giving out any secrets.

I think this is one of those posts where the author is not really looking for advice but secretly bragging. "Look at me I am so successful I have my much larger competitor begging to talk to me and I just told them to f off." Well there is nothing wrong with a little bragging if you have achieved something significant, but then just be honest and brag, don't couch it into a question.
I didn't read it as an argument for any particular environment or world view. I read it as an argument that certain people online need to pull their head out of their ass when they're proclaiming why others would be as successful as them if they only tried.
So what? I've heard of television stations and publications refusing to show certain political ads. I've heard of a bus company that won't carry atheism ads.
The Arrow of Time
We should reserve them for the most extreme times so as not to water them down. I think of the language progression as inflation. Until we come up with more-offensive phrases to replace the swear words we have, those words are the emotional cue just below escalation to physical violence.
"Mitnick said that per AT&T policy, his password could only be digits and no more than eight characters long."
I was surprised by how much attention my last article got, so I want to encourage anyone who might be interested in writing their own to just do it.

The last article: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=723826

-Leo
Yeah, that happens. That's what patents are for. Or NDA agreements. I know hackers do not like dealing with legal stuff but it is necessary and helpful sometimes.

It is much better to set up legal rights through a patent or an agreement than to rely on strangers to follow some vague business ethics code. Many successful businessmen became successful because they broke such codes.
How does skype distribute the data for the number of people online?
In Skype where it says 15,279,670 people on line, how do they distribute that data.

Do you think it's distributed peer-peer or do you think every client does a lookup to skype.com every 10 minutes or so?

If all 15 million clients are doing a lookup to skype.com every 10 minutes that's a maximum possibility of 2160,000,000 requests a day...

But even if it's only a fraction of that it's a serious amount of requests just to distribute a number!
Only if the original author believes in complete inaction. I didn't take the author's point to be that life's unfair but that's cool because it's ok that way. I took the author's point to be life's unfair and it should be changed.
I was saying that a small community whose favorite prejudice is that against prejudice would make a safe harbor in case one can't otherwise find a community of likeminded individuals.
Microsculptor’s Incredible Hulk Fits in Eye of Needle
> But if both those are true than there's really only one solution which is communism.

No. Just because one extreme position is wrong it does not follow that the opposite extreme position is right.
FTA: "I started making houses for ants because I thought they needed somewhere to live," he says. "I made them shoes and hats."
Okay. I was thinking Communism more in the idea of "let's not let the market be entirely free," not Communism in the sense of "everybody is forced to be equal." I'd argue that a completely free market would be just as terrible.
A Silicon Valley Cartel?
Food For Your Brain
His argument is more durable than requiring a "bubble" (plus, people keep talking about a new bubble, but maybe thats over already?). Ask yourself, is it possible for everyone in the country to do what your friends did.

Unless they are farmers, the answer is basically "no". More generally, are your friends doing something which actually makes the world more wealthy? Manufacturing, construction, cleaning, and public transportation are good examples of non-zero-sum (and non-derivative) industries. If not, it would still be impossible to suggest that everyone could be like them.

Not everyone can be CEO of a major corporation (who would work in this companies?). Not everyone can be an investment banker (there is only so much investment money out there), or a salesman (you have to sell someone else's product to a customer). Simply put, not everyone can have a desk job, or even a well paying job in the modern economy, because these are necessarily a subset of the total economy.

By itself, thats okay. It has always been, and will always be the case. The problem arising is that we are encouraging the population as a whole to put themselves into great debt under the pretense that they will be part this well paying economy. On top of this employee creation force, we have senior people not retiring, so there are a lot of additional employees looking for jobs. Which would be okay, except that the economy is contracting a little, and there is fewer demand for the growing supply.

This is a large, complicated issue. Its a bit naive to say that people just have to work harder.
Good designers seem to think that it is perfectly reasonable:

http://twitter.com/nathanborror/status/3416472007
_why: "Not all code needs to be a factory, some of it can just be origami."
Better can be enough, if it's ENOUGH better. The rule of thumb is that something has to be at least twice as good to replace a similar but already functioning system (the real costs of retraining and lost productivity during the changeover can almost never be accurately calculated, that's why there is the rule of thumb). For an academic view, see "The Fable of the Keys" http://www.utdallas.edu/~liebowit/keys1.html about qwerty vs Dvorak; and the version that was expanded into a book about Dvorak, Microsoft, and the internet http://www.amazon.com/Winners-Losers-Microsoft-Stan-Liebowit... .

ADDED: And Christensen in "Innovator's Dilemma" http://www.amazon.com/Innovators-Dilemma-Revolutionary-Busin... shows how slight improvements can gradually replace something that was originally better.
That's always confused me about template languages. They require knowledge of coding but don't include the full power of a traditional language. In a way it's the worst of both worlds. If you're designer is a only a Frontpage or Dreamweaver jocky, you're still hosed. If they grasp coding, why limit them?
I suppose an update to that story is in order. We didn't get some big IT contract we needed and so we let a couple of our employees go. I was one of the two.
Communicating Sequential Processes (CSP), by C. A. R. Hoare (Electronic Version)
Libertarians' views of reality are almost always less distorted than the downright wacko views held by most Democrats and Republicans, socialists and conservatives.

From the perspective of a libertarian, perhaps.
What does the blue and green in the bar graph signify?
Yea, it has been on HN before - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22936, but that was some 825 days ago! So I posted again by removing the / at the end.

Funny thing, when I did a searchYC, it shows http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=620698 with the same link as the previous one posted 825 days ago, while I tried to post this one, it showed the old one, instead of showing the new one.

I think the duplicity check should be time bound though, maybe a year or something like that !
Clearly there's a spectrum. I mean, the market we have now isn't completely free and I'm not one that has a problem with regulations. My only issue is the piece basically saying "I became 20 in a bad economy but others became 20 in a good economy so the Government should step in and fund me to the point that my experience is equal"

Some people are luckier than others and that stinks but I don't think the Government can fix that. But I have no problem with Government safety nets that stop people from falling completely down the rabbit hole either.
Could a checklist app result in lawsuits if it leads to OCD? 
For example, one might have a checklist for leaving the house. This may give you some comfort at first but may eventually lead to OCD.
Is it just me, or is this article borderline incomprehensible?

Pull quotes dropped right into the text flow, relating to nothing, and unclear in their import. Check.

Graphic design pushing text to the margins? Check.

7 different colors of text on the page? Check.

Sentences that lead in one direction but never deliver ("small e-commerce boutiques have no perceived incentives to share what they make")? Check.

Redundency? Check.

Hard to interpret figures (18.3% for indirect networks? 18.3% of what? Profits? Conversion rate? Traffic?)? Check.
Most appreciated. Thank you.

I feel a proverbial pink slip going to my ISP if they don't fix it soon. You don't mess with part of someone's lifestyle like that. Thank you for hosting my homepage.
The ultimate noprocrast...
You're accessing the DOM every iteration, so I'd bet that it does matter somewhat if blink is used a lot.

You can avoid polluting by make it an actual function and then setting the function.blinkOn instead.

You're right: individually swapping them this works better, but the intent is to have them all off or all on.

(function() {
var blinkIterator = function() {
var blinks = document.getElementsByTagName("blink"),
onOff = blinkIterator.blinkOn ? "" : "hidden";
for (var i = 0, l = blinks.length; i < l;)
blinks[i++].style.visibility = onOff;
blinkIterator.blinkOn ^= 1;
};
blinkIterator.blinkOn = 1;
window.setInterval(blinkIterator, 750);
})();
Always looking for help, I've got too many ideas and not enough time. To the point I did http://www.collegecofounders.com/beta/. Feel free to add to that listing. :)
Twitter - Streaming the world's thought/opinion/information streams.
A lot of my friends at the Founder Institute are actively looking for co-founders (http://founderinstitute.com). And they have very cool projects spanning very diverse industries. You can check a more detailed list at http://www.thefunded.com/job/list

Bottom line: if you are serious about joining a startup pre-funding, where most of the fun and the action is, Silicon Valley is full of such opportunities.

The challenge is to build trust so that the team doesn't break apart after a month. How can you trust a stranger? Friends of friends are a great way to start. Ask people you trust who they trust.
I choose not to publicly tweet my billion dollar idea.
But only Kristin C Gillette was listed as a relative. Could be though.
It's accurate, but I don't think it really transmits the appeal.

I suppose I should have a go since I made the challenge: Tell the world what you're thinking RIGHT NOW. The world listens only to people it thinks are interesting. (107 chars)
It looks like somebody should ask Santa for a thicker skin next Christmas.

The advice I read here was of the tone: "Hey, we were once where you are now. Take it from us: It gets better, but your current mindset is set for failure."

The author should spend a day picking through the youth-directed angsty tunes and movies of the early 90s. He's not the first to go through crap like this, even in recent history.

Suck it up and take on a McJob to pay the bills until things recover. The experience in social survival will do you a load of good the next time things get rough.
Surprisingly well written article. I'm going to check the rest of his blog; let's hope it's all this good.

The article is supremely smug (because he doesn't seem to consider for a second that his point of view may be incorrect), and he shamelessly dismisses the counter arguments as delusional Ayn Rand fanaticism. However, it made the rant all the more compelling, so I don't mind.

The problem is that he made no real effort to acknowledge any of the counter arguments. Starts strong. Digresses in the middle. Ends abruptly.
I didn't really think Squashed was suggesting he ought to get funding, I think he was stating that the system as it stands now, where hard work leads to nothing, is flawed. You can see the implied solution as "I need money," but from his older writings, I'd be more inclined to think it's "There's a problem with a system wherein happiness is so based on the economy, and where we're told we need a good job to be happy, so that our happiness is based on a fluctuating system." The problem isn't the lack of a job, in other words, so much as it's the emphasis on having certain jobs.

ALSO: Can we please stop downvoting based on who we agree and disagree with? I'm enjoying this conversation quite a lot and I hate seeing Tom and myself dipping into 0 and -1 while productive debate's going on.
Usain Bolt Celebrates Early ... Very Early

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zzSpPaCIG0g
Nickb missing?
Prakash and I help moderate nickb's NewMogul.com, which has been down for a day or so. We haven't heard from him for over 40 days, and cannot reach him by phone or email. Does anyone have any information on his whereabouts? (For those who are new to Hacker News, nickb is one of its oldest members: http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=nickb )
Somebody pitched this:	harrisimo A sporting event where you try and toss computers as far as you can #micropitch 4 minutes ago
There are two kinds of people in the world, libertarians (whether or not they call themselves that) and evil scumbags who want to control other people. It makes no difference what excuses you make for your evil; you all still have to twist reality to justify it to each other and to yourselves.
Not really his fault a couple paragraphs down he reveals this gem:

Mitnick said that per AT&T policy, his password could only be digits and no more than eight characters long.
If you can make JS calls from AS, then yes I think MixPanel will totally work for you.
But the only way to remedy his concern is the opposite extreme. Because no matter how hard the Mexican immigrant works he's never going to achieve anywhere near the same amount as the guy whose parents sent him to Harvard.

Again, keep in mind this guy started out by saying "I'm 20, I went to all the right schools and I didn't get a great job so life is unfair". So he's not arguing for lifting those who are profoundly disadvantaged out of poverty (which I have no problem with). He's arguing for fairness among the upper classes meaning everyone should be equal. I have no problem with making sure the kids of the Mexican immigrant can go to college but this guy's arguing for equal treatment for all and that's just not something the Government should be trying to do (because it will profoundly backfire)
Your status feed for everyone to see. See how many idiots follow you!
Remember, the ideas of any age are that of its ruling class. To say that the goal of capital accumulation is the "natural" state of humanity, is to ignore each set of social relations imposed on the populace by the ruling class of each social epoch. In the Feudal period, it was the divinity of the monarch and the "natural" state of the peasantry being tied to the land, surrendering a tithe to the king and the clergy. Before that, it was "natural" to conquer and subjugate the enemy within a slave society like Rome.

Also, everything that was tried before was either smashed by state intervention backed by capitalist interest, e.g. the Pinochet coup in Chile in 1973, or Franco during the Spanish civil, or was a Stalinist dictatorship.
So you see a problem, which is, "The way that modern society works puts a lot of people in soul-killing menial jobs and wastes their childhood", and your solution is "It's okay, other people have gone through it, stop complaining"? That's both cruel and obtuse.
Reason is artificial. They could have just used email.
Yes, but I didn't read much about HOW it should be changed - just that life's unfair and the first step should be to admit that.
I'm fairly sure you missed my point.
I interpreted the dot com comments as an example of the larger point about the disconnect between 'being smart/working hard' and 'success'.

E.g. People get rich without being smart or working hard. They also don't get rich by being smart and working hard.

Ergo Rand-ian assumptions are debatable and their conclusions in serious doubt.
There are many kinds of people in the world. One similar dichotomy I could draw is between people who appreciate the nuance and complexity of being alive and having to make millions of decisions as you grow up, and people who think it's possible to draw a line and declare some people as evil and other people as good based on a single part of their existence.
Communism works fairly well - in small doses: i.e. for groups small enough for everybody to know everybody else. This allows for discipline of goldbrickers and avoidance of takeover by charismatics. See, for example, the Hutterites: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hutterite
I think the other comments on this thread may have missed something. The problem isn't that your personal information is revealed upon purchase. The problem is that Android applications, with their "phone home" tech, allow some really creepy locational tracking.
If you buy my GPS app, I now have your name, phone number....AND I can find out exactly where you are every time you use my application.

It's not the personal information that raises hair on the back of my neck, it's that in combination with the ability to track your exact location in conjunction with the aforementioned information.

While sending your info to merchants you purchase from may be a 'no duh' piece of information...it does raise some tricky implications.
Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in
its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one; for when we suffer, or are exposed to the same miseries BY A GOVERNMENT, which we might expect in a country WITHOUT GOVERNMENT, our calamity is heightened by reflecting that we furnish the means by which we suffer.

-- Tom Paine, Common Sense

Gov't is at best a necessary evil - communism is unmitigated evil.
Seems expensive. Couldn't they just have used a USB temperature sensor? The Phidgets one is like $15.

I've tinkered a bit with building a wireless temperature sensor network for my house, though...
How to get free Web Stream Recorder 2010
So cool. Ken's posts make me want a SheevaPlug badly. Not sure what for or why - I just know I need one.
Communism? I certainly didn't read it that way. Have you considered the idea of a basic income - it's been mentioned before here, most recently http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=756880

Via the inspiration for that thread: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income: "Winners of the Nobel Prize in Economics that fully support a basic income include Herbert Simon[24], Friedrich Hayek[25][26], James Meade, Robert Solow[27], and Milton Friedman[28]."

Hardly communists, or even Marxists. It seems to me that the original poster is not arguing for government enforced fairness (and communism isn't any better at delivering that than capitalism IMO), but for mitigation of the worst inequities. Over in Europe colege education is heavily subsidized by the state, on the understanding that the state will collect a rather greater share of subsequent income in the form of taxes. This is by no means perfect, and indeed European college graduates are not assured of a job or promising opportunities on graduating either, far from it; but at least they graduate without enormous debts.

On the flip side, America provides far better business opportunities for entrepreneurs, not least the simple fact of a single market of 300 million with a single dominant language and a national media landscape, which is not to be sneezed at. Indeed, in 50-100 years, when China or India have caught up with the developed world in terms of GDP per capita, the potential entrepreneurial gains from being able to market to a Billion people at once will make US business fortunes look modest.

I think the point being made here is not that communism or any other system is better than capitalism, but that diligence and loyalty are socially exalted but economic rewards flow more towards opportunists and rent-seekers.
What about nutrition, fitness, and performance enhancing chemicals, legal or otherwise?

I'm not saying Bolt is a User, but I think it's safe to say he's applying every advantage available.
Not my downvote but it may be because you're in the wrong room - this thread has nothing to do with libertarians. Perhaps the above is a perfect example of some libertarians' abject lack of failure to argue the merits of their ideas at all times and places, appropriate or otherwise.