skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is at best tangential to what you're saying, but it's something I always wonder about whenever I see a discussion about practicing writing: is there an upper threshold to writing ability?

See, I've been writing in fairly substantial amounts for about the past seven years. When I look at my old writing, it's clear that I improved extremely rapidly for the first year or so, and there's noticeable (though less pronounced) improvement for the next three or four years, but recently I think I've plateaued -- I no longer write in quite the same way I did a year ago, but I can't really distinguish between my writing then and now in terms of quality.

What's more, I'm not sure I can see anywhere for my writing to go -- I feel like I've maxed out my ability to appeal to my own aesthetic (in prose). And the fact that that even seems possible is a little painful.

I have to go and don't have time to really finish saying whatever I'm saying here. Have any of you ever felt like this? Have any of you ever gotten over feeling like this?
I think tools are an important part of the equation.

Say you are paying someone to demolish your concrete driveway. Would you pay someone with a jack hammer who can get the job done in an hour the same rate you'd pay someone with a sledgehammer, which will take 8 hours? The task is the same. The value of the completed project is the same.

But if the jack hammer owner charges a fix bid billed for half the hourly rate of the sledge hammer owner, he spends an hour and gets paid for four.

In a fixed bid contract, the jack hammer could charge 50% more than he would estimate the demolition (originally billed at half the hourly rate of the sledge of 4 hours) at 6 hours and still make more money and spend less time: 6x as much money and spend 1/8th as much time completing the job. If his estimate was way under actuals and it ends up taking him twice as long (2 hours) as he originally thought it would take, which was 1 hour, he still makes triple the hourly rate for two hours of work (6 hour billed estimate, 2 hours of work) than the guy with the sledge hammer!

The use of tools that accelerate task completion, in this case an 8x improvement (jack over sledge) enables the jackhammer operator to underestimate the labor times and still make more money at lower times to completion. Plus, the driveway owner gets his demolished driveway in 25% of the time that it would have taken with a sledgehammer and that is still at a project overrun of 100%!

But the world doesn't understand equations like this or really accept the value of advanced technologies. I use technology to build custom software products that are way more advanced than what typical developers use, so I can build them 10x faster and charge half the rate and still make more money!

I know a local case where a company is paying a guy to use Perl to build a data driven website using files -- instead of an SQL Database. he's been working on the website for over 5 months and it still isn't finished and it has already reached the maximum of its flexibility. It's already going to have to be re-architected to enable the features the client wants now. If the local company had gone with our company, which uses a flexible sql based infrastructure, then the project would have been completed in about 2 weeks and still have lots of flexibility to go! New features would be easy to add.

Now, the programmer is coming to us asking to use our technology to help him complete his project!

So, I love the current state of the software world. Frustrated customers paying too much for projects that typically fail are a great market segment.
Is it white on pale yellow and unreadable for anyone else?
Measuring Economic Growth from Outer Space
I'm not disagreeing with you but I hope you at least understand that the world you describe hasn't existed since Teddy Roosevelt picked up "The Jungle" in 1906. Since then Government has made a business out of trying to manipulate the market in a way that speeds along the positive aspects and eliminates the negative ones. A trend we all know has reached epic proportions with the current bail outs.

So, for better or worse, we are a long long way from a Government that only intervenes when there's a monopoly.
Microsoft Sells Razorfish for a Whopping $500+ Million
In the Air - Gladwell on ideas (2008)
You cannot not design first, no matter if you are developer or designer or UX.

When I did the Nasdaq Market Replay app, we sketched out some of the vital areas of the application, then tested to see whether they where viable, in the meantime we went on to do the rest of the design and getting feedback from the developers to see whether what we wanted was possible.

My personal philosophy is to design in the environment that we are developing in as early as possible.

That way we don't have this blind tag team situation where designers mindfuck and developers has to solve their mindfucks because the client approved them.

The agile process requires that all the involved are contributing all the time.
"Plays well with others" is so incredibly important, and, at least in my experience, in an entirely different universe from the 'rockstar' mindset.

Working with a 'rockstar', frankly, sucks. They know everything, they're better than you at everything, and they're faster than anybody else... at least, in their own minds.

It's impossible to work with someone who is 'too talented' to listen to other people. Sure, most of these people are genuinely talented, but they seem to lose track of the fact that other people can have skills and knowledge as well.

It gets worse when the rockstar starts managing -- all kinds of direction changes to chase new development fads, huge micromanaging, massive weekend rewrites of other peoples' code... no thanks.
I'm trying to lose weight right now. Actually, I'm trying to get in the best shape of my life, so that I feel better physically and enjoy the sports I play more.

I've been losing about 1/2 pound per week for most of this year, while spending about a half hour per day in the pool, and maybe another hour on the basketball court.

I took a two weeks off and went to France on vacation. I ate a bunch of great food (though never "stuffing" myself). I walked around to visit museums. I never thought about fitness. I lost 5 pounds in the two weeks.

There's probably a few reasons why this happened. I was on vacation, so there was no stress-triggered eating. I was getting lots of low-intensity exercise that burned calories without stimulating hunger. I was eating slowly, savoring the tastes of the different foods I was trying. I'm trying to bring these lessons back with me.
This was a tenet of the 37signals book "Getting Real"

see: http://gettingreal.37signals.com/ch09_Interface_First.php
Long read, but not long enough: it ends with "to be continued next week".
So, for better or worse, we are a long long way from a Government that only intervenes when there's a monopoly.

We are where we want to be. The poster asked the question of should government intervene. To say that "government will intervene whether we want to or not" is to engage in circular reasoning. One supposes that in order to ask the question, there must be a choice for the answerer to make.

I also have heard this "those were the old times" argument quite a bit lately, and its wearing thin for me. To some degree, yes, government has intervened and mucked around with markets. But to a larger degree it hasn't. And the decision to muck around or not, last I checked, was a political one, not done simply because times have changed. It's very much debatable whether government intervention in various markets constitute a good or bad thing.

Teddy was a smart man. So was Jefferson. We continue to find and address these issues as we can, doing the best with what light we have.
You can, but that doesn't work very well.

Sure it does, just along a different metric - visual cohesiveness. It's a big difference between design and programming - you can and probably should slice off pieces of functionality to implement but doing that with design leads to one of the biggest criticisms of designers within an agile/xp/scrum programming setup: a frankenstein-looking interface.

There's a reason why "agile design" and "agile ux" is gaining steam as topics amongst designers (especially startup-focused ones like me) and it's because yes designing everything upfront is old school waterfall and clearly bad but designing on the go with super fast iterations can lead to an ill-considered spray-and-pray approach to the visuals. So we're trying to figure out a middle ground where the designer isn't just following behind and applying polish. That diminishes a designer's role just as much as it does to make a programmer always come later in the process and treat them like someone that simply implements what the designers make.

I'm not advocating an approach, just pointing out that there's definitely positives to having design go first, especially if you do user-focused research like running usability tests on mockups or paper prototypes. It'd be great if you could flip flop back and forth from having design or engineering drive the discussion and that's exactly the setup promoted in Bill Buxton's Sketching The User Experience.
We've been noticing

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=748880

this trend for a while. Some suggested fixes

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=748933

like a Hacker News Canon are good ideas that could be implemented much like searchyc.com, as totally separate projects.

I propose a solution, for consideration by the community:

"If you're posting to inform us of the existence of something, assume we already know."

Don't post a link to arduino.cc.

Maybe post a link to a fairly ordinary Arduino project.

Do post a link to an innovative new prototyping framework or exceptional new project.

Do post a link to your own Arduino project.

Don't post a link to a programming language's home page.

Maybe post a link to an article about a language.

Do post a link to the home page of a newly released language.

Do post a link to your own code or experience with the language.

We already know about rasterbator, Io, and Arduino. C'mon. We're hackers.

( anyway, I offer this as an idea for potential adoption by HN, not as a criticism; at the moment, a LOT of submissions seem to be of the "Whoa, I stumbled across a cool X!" class. That seems, at first blush, like a good recipe; in practice, I think it leads to more reddit-ish submissions than HN-ish, particularly as HN grows. )
humans are twice as upset about losses as they are happy about wins

Any research to back that up? I always thought that was a subjective thing, in that it varies for everyone.
That's a pretty interesting way of visualizing it, best I've seen. Some others...

http://www.sorting-algorithms.com (Interesting animations of all the major sorting algorithms).

Although my all time favourite is GDB + GnuPlot + 3d Array (array index/values/step) plot and stepping through the steps of the sorting algorithm.
Focus less on solar: The Grand Energy Transition (gaseous energy revolution)
The problem seems to be that "design" means two different things here - #1 User experience and graphic design, and #2 program architecture. I was talking mostly about #2.

I agree that if you want a slick-looking app, you have to put some upfront thought into #1 - maybe not nail down where every pixel goes, but establish the metaphors, colour schemes, mock up some sample screens and so on.
There are thousands, if not millions, of inexpensive phones available from re-manufacturers. A J2ME capable phone can be had for less than $20. Activate it with a pay-as-you go plan if you want to send/receive data or just use them as-is without activating them. Here is one company that will sell you one phone:

http://www.zendoo.com/

Your options increase and price goes down if you want to buy 20 or more phones of one kind.

My company buys these phones, loads a j2ME midlet that always runs in the background getting GPS locations, and sells the unit along with the service for businesses to track their vehicles.
If you billed fixed rate and the client changes the requirements, then you change the fixed rate.

Say you estimate the cost at $10,000 and they want you to make a change, you say, "Okay, but this change wasn't included in the $10,000 so we will have to estimate how much the change will cost and add it to the bill. If you want us to do that, let us know."

This is why you have to outline the requirements before you do a fixed bid.

Instead of saying it's going to take 4-6 more hours, you say it's going to cost $400-600 more dollars, assuming you estimate at $100/hr. If it really takes you 1 hour, then you still make $400-600, but it only takes an hour so your hourly rate just went from $100 an hour to at least $400 an hour.

If you're a highly productive programmer and use the right tools, then a fixed bid can come out in your favor if you estimate projects using the hourly rates and estimates that not so productive programmers use.
Graphic design. But it looks like few are reading the article that thoroughly anyway. ;)

I have to agree with the article up to a certain point though: creating mockups helps me find out what I need to build. Of course, creating a graphic design is something entirely different.
Boost mobile has multiple J2ME phones available for around $50. Just check Wallmart or Best Buy. You'll need to load the games with a serial cable, but the phones can take a real beating.

J2ME has no future, so it'd be a poor startup idea. Trust me.

You might also want to check garage sales/eBay for old gameboys and games. They're more fun and more robust.
Let's torture the metaphor a bit: learning about a city from the other people in your hostel will probably teach you a lot about nightlife, but it might not let you discover that the local museum has an amazing permanent collection of wood-block prints, or that there's an incredible local tour guide who does an english-language walking tour of historical points starting once a day at 9AM. Your dorm-mates probably won't get you to the top of Mount Fuji, lost in the English countryside, or working for board in a private farm in the south of France.

When you're traveling, the experiences accessible from the Lonely Planet strategy have the potential to go much deeper than what you can learn from the guy in the next bunk. That doesn't mean that you want to bury your nose in the guidebook, but it's probably not a bad idea to use it once in a while, either.

I'm as pessimistic about the Magical Internet Business Model (tm) as the next guy, but I still recognize that there are businesses that cannot be founded via bootstrap methods. Thanks to the magic of the cloud, you can now very quickly and cheaply build social-media-whatzits, sheep-throwing widgets, and 99-cent digital hoo-hahs for the iPhone. But you are not likely to build the next Amazon or Amgen or PayPal in your bedroom, using Heroku. Your method of travel strongly influences the places you can go.
I'm not sure that "design" is necessary up-front.

Most programmers aren't. And it's often a tug-of-war between designers and programmers to gain respect for their roles: have a designer always come later in the process and you'll get more of a limited traditional visual designer; have one always come earlier in the process and hand down visual specs like they're stone tablets, now you've got old school art directors from the Mad Men era and programmers are treated like code monkeys (still mostly the case at ad agencies today, actually); have one on your team that can design upfront while doing usability testing to validate features, all on a tight schedule, now you're talking about today's interaction designers, but they don't come cheap and most startups have a hard time landing one.
The Everything Disease: A Forensic Analysis of the Popularity of Pokemon
Graphic design.

Yeah, it looks like it. So the article is poorly titled and poorly worded in that respect.
> As science writer Gary Taubes noted in his 2007 book Good Calories, Bad Calories: Fats, Carbs, and the Controversial Science of Diet and Health, "The obese tend to expend more energy than lean people of comparable height, sex, and bone structure, which means their metabolism is typically burning off more calories rather than less."

Bizarre irrelevant quote from that book. I think it was made while blasting the eat-less-exercise-more crowd which does not work. Taubes argues that the wrong theory comes from a misunderstanding of the conservation of energy principle, i.e., for anyone who gains weight it has to be true but it does not explain the cause. Growing teens eat more than they expend in energy and the reason is growth hormone. Same applies to gaining weight, the cause is insulin which is elevated when we eat carbs. Cut the carbs and lose weight and possibly a raft of other modern diseases. The science is very clear and the medical field is ignoring it because they owe us a huge mea culpa.

Read the book but here is more data.
http://thras.blogspot.com/2009/08/diet.html
I recommend the mono diet. Ingredients: 1 part dirty (ex-)girlfriend. I lost 15 pounds in one month! Highly recommended.

Now that I have that weight off I feel the need to keep it that way, so I've gone from 10 beers a week (ballmer peak..) down to 1 or 2 and cut out as much stuff that has High Fructose Corn Syrup from my intake as I can. And I'm trying to do the CRON thing and eat slower and eat like half of my meals or just have more, smaller meals. Keeps my metabolism up throughout the day and helps me convert more to energy. That seems to have done the trick.

PS - rice cakes and rice/whey protein are great
Pressure-sensitive keyboard
Let me summarise. If you exercise you'll feel hungrier and if you don't show some self-restraint, you'll probably eat more and either not lose anything or actually put on weight. As the saying goes "Abs are made in the kitchen, not in the gym."
Is it talking about this http://www.google.com/support/voice/bin/answer.py?hl=en&... ? If so, this has been available for quite some time.
Google Wave's Web of Protocols (diagram and commentary)
Agreed that we agree - I limited the discussion to #1 because that's how the blog post described it.

#2 is important as well, but honestly, I find that worrying too much about #2 upfront makes it too easy for coders to go down blind alleys and turn into "architecture astronauts" as Spolsky would say because they're busy implementing what's technically interesting rather than pure minimum needed to make an interface work. And don't get me wrong, that's just as much a danger for designers to go off into visual polish mode and get the interface looking like lickable candy rather than making the bare minimum interface they need to test with real users, whether with usability testing or metrics or what have you. I'm definitely an advocate for both designers and programmers to implement the smallest possible feature set they need to test their app or site in the real world.

Speaking of which, I'm not sure the original blog author limited the scope of their app either - they didn't explain how they define "success". I think it might just be that the interface actually got made and photoshop files got sliced up into html/css? That's a pretty low bar if that's the case.
Modern PCs are pretty durable, IMO. Of course, if you go out and try to build a sub-$1000 PC, it's going to fail sooner or later. Invest in a durable case, a solid power supply and plenty of fans for cooling. I've found cheap DVD+RW drives fail very often, so invest in something higher quality than your $30 DVD+RW drive. I've never had a hard disk fail, but my motherboard has failed me several times. Now I have a Gigabit "gaming" motherboard (even though I'm not much of a gamer) that has lasted for quite some time.

I'm not sure how much LCD monitors last, but CRTs are known to work well for very long periods of time. I'm sure nobody wants CRTs these days, but I thought this fact was worth pointing out.

Oh, and I hear Apple's hardware is pretty good. In one year of heavy use, my MacBook has never ever failed me even once. This, of course, depends on how you handle your laptop. Mine never goes out of the house, so it's never exposed to shocks, dust or intense heat.

My point is, with a bit of thought, it's possible to build a PC that can last for quite some time.
Best intro to c#/.net/wpf book?
It's usually pretty easy to determine what the best intro book is on any given topic with some googling around, buy I'm having trouble finding a review of what c# books are out there.

Would anyone care to recommend a book (or many books) to a complete beginner when it comes to c#/.net/wpf? I'm interested in the language and the platform and the clr in general.

Thanks in advance!
This is an interesting tangent, because unlike musical ability, or obviously, athletic ability, writing is independent of ones physical skill. So I would look to other skills of the mind to find the answer.

A comment here once told of how the commenter's father had been working on a physics phd, he worked hard, got a nice letter of recommendation. But when he asked to see a friends letter there was little more than the line 'Nobel material'. After that he quit for a different path.

I expect there is a point where diminishing returns become greater than the cost of effort. You may be able to improve yet, but it may not be worth it.
install them asteRISK and let pay $$$ for support
Too bad Sun canceled its Java processors years ago because they were crap. It's not clear that there's any value in these patents.
If Walmart chooses to not sell certain CDs that I want to play in my car, I can go across the street to Best Buy, or online, and buy them there.

If Amazon chooses to not sell certain software I can go to the manufacturer's site and buy and install it from there.

The app store on the iPhone is the only legitimate source to make an application purchase for the entire platform. Your analogy does not hold.
> lots of low-intensity exercise that burned calories

The way to lose fat is with intense and brief exercise, like weight circuit training with no rest between sets, on an empty stomach a couple times a week.

Acute exercise in the fasted state, compared with the carbohydrate-fed state, for a given exercise intensity and duration, stimulates the oxidation of fatty acids from both intramyocellular
(16) and peripheral (17) fat depots.
doi:10.1152/japplphysiol.01195.2007

Related:
Short fast sprints 'cut' diabetes
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/scotland/edinburgh_and_ea...

Brief intense training decreases insulin sensitivity, which leads to less fat.

Working out every day to "burn calories" is a very poor use of time. Work out hard and short (20 min) a couple times a week. This will change your hormone profile, boosting growth hormone and testosterone and reducing insulin sensitivity. Those changes make you leaner.
I think we have moved past that expection that a personal computer, a mainframe or electronics should last 30 years.

If you need a system that's reliable for decades (like a pension system), you probably should also think about how are you going to keep the system running after the current hw arch is discontinued and people knowing the specific programming language are retiring.

Nostalgia is great but I don't really care if my intel pc that I replace once a year lasts for 5 years or 30 years.
Maybe you could look around for a good teacher? Or even some new people to collaborate/learn from?