skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The connotation exists, mind, because most people who are labelled with the term are so labelled because they've lost some touch with reality.

Mind you, protesting for basic human rights, that's not extreme. It was seen as extreme at the time, but that's moderate. Similarly, some protests today, like the "don't let companies rob us because we're dying" protests, might be called extreme by the "other side", but they're not really extreme. That's a rational cause and most of the people protesting for it are rational people.

On the other hand, last year I participated in a handful of protests, largely because I had nothing better to do, and there you find real extremists. You find people who think that the Jews are all part of a conspiracy to kill nonJews, and you get the people who think organizations of any time are detrimental to society, and you get the antitech people.

I remember posting once on a friend's wall that while I appreciated her passion in supporting gay rights, I couldn't help but think gay rights parades were obnoxious and hurting the cause. A friend of hers in turn responded in a rant that said I couldn't possibly understand society if I was heterosexual, I was probably a repressed homosexual, I was actively harming his existence by living, and I was a pretentious bourgeoise without a mind.

In response to that unwarranted rant, I decided to become an extremist moderate. My intolerance is towards extremists. In the half-year since I decided that, I've found that in every situation I choose to insert myself, I feel I'm fighting for a good cause. People who refuse to listen to the words of their opponents are never wholly the good guys.
An Uneducated View of Checked vs. Unchecked Exceptions
I posted a bit too quick and too late at night. See corrections on this thread.
AuroraUX
Try extending the time on your timeout in the example, say to 30000 milliseconds. You might get a surprise when you see your function get called immediatley.

In the article, you are right that he should use prototype, but not for the reason you mention. In the example, he does this.foo = function, so the function does get associated with the object. The problem is that the function gets recreated every time the HotDog constrictor gets called. Better to put getCondiments on the prototype, so that it is only defined once.
Not really. Google is an advertising company now. When they started, they had no idea that's what they would become. Search is being leveraged for eyeballs to sell advertising space.

Google still does search, but it's business has nothing to do with search directly.
People from reputable universities don't need to vocally assert their capabilities, because the mere mention of their university is enough for people to acknowledge their capabilities. On the other hand, people from more obscure universities need to vocally assert their skills and experience in order to obtain the same recognition of their capabilities. This is just a plain fact of society and asserting your skills and experience is not in any way arrogant or elitist behavior. He completely confuses being vocal about your capabilities with vocally downplaying the capabilities of others, for instance the capabilities of people from reputable universities. He seems completely unaware that people can feel the need to assert their capabilities without in any way wanting or trying to downplay the capabilities of others.
Facebook is already there.

What makes you think they click ads? I've heard the opposite.
Do you think IBM, Microsoft, Apple and that whole bunch will let that happen?
He covers that:

'I remember that some of the most arrogant kids were the A-/B+ students who always took the opportunity to assert that, although they did not get as high marks as the A/A+ students, they were somehow 'smarter' in other ways '

(kidding, kidding :)
I'm sorry but this isn't a new one for sociology...

I've observed that some of the people who display the greatest degrees of elitism and snobbery are those who are technically skilled in their given area of expertise but who do not necessarily have the most reputable externally-recognizable marks of status.

Indeed. Those who need to display elitism are those who aren't automatically accepted as elite. Similarly, those who are naturally accepted as elite, don't need make as much of an effort to display their eliteness. This is so established that the act of not attempting to show one's eliteness is often subtler a mark of greater eliteness. And this is the basic conundrum of elitism: how the 'old guard' defends itself against the arriviste etc.

I'd suggest a reading of De Tocqueville, Veblen and modern signalling theory.
I've been skeptical since reading this:

http://blog.jwegener.com/2009/04/23/bug-labs-versus-apple-do...
I don't think they click ads, I see friends checking out ads all the time. Particularly music ads. I'd imagine that it's not just a small-time thing, considering they're in the green now, but perhaps that money's coming from something else.

Their ads are also a lot better than they were a year ago. They target more effectively, within reason. (My ads are screwy since I list no information about myself, but they used to try and sell me Arrested Development t-shirts and they almost succeeded on multiple occasions.)
Think of the letter this way also: there were millions of people who faced the same awful conditions every day. But of those millions, how many were able to communicate the experience to someone else?

That's what made him great - he was able to communicate what all the other millions could only feel.
What's the motivation for writing the article?

To me, there's always some way to feel superior by pointing fingers. I think he's driving his own brand of elitism.

(Somebody please accuse me of the same thing, and let's see if we can recursively create a singularity)
Mozilla coders join Palm, apparently jabbing Apple
Which is still a ridiculous point: A/A+ students are not necessarily smarter, more successful, more intelligent, whatever-you-want-to-call-it than B+/A- students. His sole defense of that assertion is

if you're so damn smart, wouldn't it take you just slightly more effort to get an A

which I cannot characterize as anything else but a total lack of any sense of what someone may want to do with his time, other than obtain high grades, combined with the unfounded accusation that they all consider themselves capable of doing better.

He completely rules out the possibility that out of numbers 5 through 15 out of a 100, five may rather want to spend their time, let's say, starting a company, practicing a sport or contributing code to some open source project.

That's when the real problem shows it's ugly head: they are made to feel like they have to excuse themselves for their grades, as anything below 'perfect' is always questioned, as the article did: "why don't you get higher grades?"

For me, the answer really was exactly as he says: because I have a fucking life out of school. However, the intention of that answer wasn't to play down the grades of others or to assert my intelligence. I won't deny they usually also have a life out of school. The intention was purely and solely: to answer the question that everyone keeps asking. I've given that answer so many times I can only think of it shouted with the expletive in it. And then grade-obsessed nitwits like this guy throw a hissy fit because they think I'm trying to trump them. No, I don't bloody care about trumping you. If I cared, I would spend my time trying to score higher grades, so I'd get into that prestigious university. I'm not sure I would succeed, but the point is: I'm not even trying to best you. God, guys like this still piss me off. They don't want to accept the fact that there may have been guys that could outdo them, but didn't bother.
Competition for people's attention. No one does anything quite like you, but there are plenty of other writers, photographers or musicians for your audience to pay attention to.

If you're able to make a comfortable living doing what you like, then that's fantastic. (No sarcasm or irony intended.) But the assumption I had was we were talking about success at the top levels of a field, be it art, science or business. Any time you have multiple people doing similar things, competition develops.

I'm a Ph.D. student, and the ideal is we do interesting things and tell interested people about what we did. The reality is that the conferences we submit to can only accept a finite number of papers. Hence, there is a competition. Similar rules apply to things as basic as getting funding and getting a job.
That's like saying that Walmart's business is cash registers.

If I could aquire either Google's search business, or their ad business, I would take search, no question. The ad part could be rebuilt on search, but the opposite is not true.
A/A+ students are, by definition, more successful at school than B+/A- students. That's the only sense of the phrase I meant it in.
one with money it.
GeoEye gives look at Iranian Nuclear Site
Spending a billion to send a probe to Mars to take a few happy snaps leaves us with one less billion to spend.

zero-sum fallacy. You assume that all we get from the effort is some photos, ignoring the knowledge gains in fields as diverse as robotics, data compression/processing and astronomy (eg space weather) which must all be improved in pursuit of such a goal. The knowledge gained from such endeavors can have a direct impact back here on earth but helping us to build safer and more capable autonomous machines, make more of our bandwidth and thus lessen our energy use, and craft better satellites that be of greater utility in studying weather, deforestation, disease outbreaks and so on.

I strongly object to this 'what's it all for except vanity' whinge. We do it in order to obtain a greater understanding of our environment, and history shows that science and technology pretty much always pays for itself in the long run through benefits to all humanity. Just like delivering and utilizing aid more efficiently in places like Africa or Bangladesh could someday yield intellectual benefits that would aid the process of colonising a planet with scarce resources.

If we just wanted pretty pictures, we could buy coffee table books or a nice camera and go on a photo tour. The images from Mars are generally not that spectacular, visually. What makes them important is the tremendous step forward in human knowledge that they represent. That's why that photograph of Neil Armstrong (edit sorry, of Aldrin BY Armstrong) standing on the moon is, to me at least, still the single greatest achievement of humanity.
The Distribution of Top Level COM Domains
I think the author is in error to assume that all people attend elite schools for the same reasons. Some people are honestly the best in their field and will gravitate to the best schools, others simply desire the best pedigree, and some people simply want to go to the best school they can.

I don't think that Ivy alumni are hesitant to name drop their school. Some are smug; most aren't. As I have gotten further from college the conversations generally swing toward what you are doing, rather than where you went.

The generalization about 2nd tier students is also too broad. My CS degree is from a 2nd tier school (RIT 01), and when talking with others from similar schools it seems like there is occasionally an elitist; but it isn't that common.

There are plenty of people who are elitist because they have something to prove. They may have gone to a great school, or no school at all. In the end it doesn't matter; they are simply annoying.
Google Serves a Cease-and-Desist On Android Modder
Its an interesting topic. Not sure the blog post really proved his point, but a bit of "arrogance in the large" (on the internet), doesn't bug me. I don't expect to be able to decide if his stated credentials mean anything; just that he is stating they do and establishes how he feels relative to the other statement he's making.

I can be arrogant at times, both in public posts and with people that know me well. For the public assertions, I don't expect people to buy my assertions. Simply asserting them may set a tone I find, at the moment, to be useful. The reader can decide for themselves how to take it.
But that's a competition with a few hundred thousand judges. It's easy to nab eyeballs when there are so many.

As for "top levels", I don't know how to determine that. I hold Vimeo in higher regard than I do Youtube, for instance, even if Vimeo is much smaller. I'd rather work on CollegeHumor than on Saturday Night Live, since they do better work, though I'd much rather start my own group and make something even better. The musicians that I like are frequently obscure or weird or simply unpopular; I'd say that I'm more impressed with Frank Zappa as an artist than I am with Paul McCartney (the Beatles aside), but McCartney's certainly the more famous of the two. My favorite handful of musicians/directors/authors aren't big names, even within any niche. I still think they're the best people I've found, though. So even if I'm not famous for what I do, as long as I'm doing the best work I consider myself the victor.

I'm past the point where I believe success has "levels". If you're not satisfied with what you're doing, you haven't succeeded. Once you are, then you're just as much a success as anybody.
Bruce Eclkel's pretty much state the anti-checked-exception camp: http://www.mindview.net/Etc/Discussions/CheckedExceptions There are very good comments from both points of view. The blog was written several years ago, so his solution is somewhat dated.

I think checked exceptions are a bad idea for a couple of reasons. First is their most acclaimed benefit: they force you to deal with the exception immediately, even if you have no solution for it. You have to decide whether to catch the exception or add a throws clause, which changes the method signature and breaks it for any users of your method. The the default decision for many programmers is to log the exception and swallow it, intending to come back later. I have had to dig through applications to find sql exceptions that were caught but not dealt with.

The second big problem I find is the poor design of exception classes. It is not uncommon to find a class that throws a half-dozen exceptions. Every time you call a new method you have a new exception to deal with. Either it should have a single exception with different error codes for the different cases, or the exceptions should be subclassed from a master exception.
2 other points that are important for RSI/wrist care: keep your wrist in line when you're keyboarding: top of hand in line with top of forearm, and not cocked in towards thumb or out. This means (for me) rolling up a hand towel , put under heels of hands.

Also mind your wrists when you're driving, riding bike, using power tools, stuff like that. It's easy to cock your wrists at bad angles doing all of those and more.
Yes my mistake. milliseconds is the first argument. I just copied the function text verbatim. My real point was that you don't need to use apply in this context,, as the author implied.
It's one of those meme title formats - a flat out lie too.
Why can't you build a great product working by your schedule? Working on a team doesn't mean being with the team at all times. You need both time alone and time together.
Not by definition, because the definition of success at school isn't "getting high grades". School is not the end, it's only a means. If I had to give a single metric for success at school it would be 'education'; those who learn more are more successful at school. This isn't necessarily reflected by test scores.
Did they really list the "I'm feeling lucky button" as a time saving feature in their first press release? I've spent a lot of time writing documents like this recently and I can only imagine how people would scold me for including a such a minor detail in a press release.
Not exactly rocket science: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_order_quantity
I feel the same way.

It's funny you mentioned working-from-home companies, because that's exactly how I deal with this problem. :) And it's something everyone should ask about at an interview; these days, a company had better cough up a VPN to hire me.

It's simple: I know that I'll think of something at midnight on a Wednesday, and want to log in to flush it out (or sometimes, when I wake up on Sunday). So I work at home at least half the time; and if I'm feeling even slightly lacking in energy, I don't even bother logging in. I know that eventually the drive will return (probably later that afternoon or evening). I have a cell phone, I check E-mail and office voice mail now and then. And I've been finishing at least as much every week as I did years ago when I was in the office all day long, except I'm a lot happier.
That's because they don't do anything groundbreaking. Not to run down the hard work of astronauts and mission planners - I am very cognizant of the effort and achievement that goes into things like maintaining the Hubble telescope for so long.

The Space Shuttle was cool, tremendously cool - we built a reusable spacecraft. That blew my mind in the 1980s. So did the idea of a space station, and indeed the ISS is also fairly cool - although people would be a lot impressed if it was bigger and had rotational gravity.

The reason the space-optimism is gone is twofold: 1) it is hard to do stuff in space, and it's true there's not so much we could usefully do on the moon, that would have immediate, obvious short term benefits; but 2) it's been >30 years since we [qua humanity] went to the moon and even though we've done all sort of insane technical stuff with lasers, computers, and what-not, it seems - especially to the casual onlooker - that we can't think of a single interesting thing to do on the Moon now that we couldn't have done 30 years ago.

1) is an issue, for sure (although I feel limited by my own lack of scientific knowledge in considering the possible benefits). But 2) just pisses me off. We can't think of anything cool and somewhat affordable that we could do on the moon? Really? Even with robots? Moon TV NOW godammit!
I meant "top levels" as best in class, using whatever metric you want to apply. This is by no means has to be financial success or fame.

To bring us back to the original point, I would be shocked if the artists that you consider best in class did not work hard.
The refined version for those from Harvard is:

Q: Where did you go to school?

A: Boston.

Q: uhh, where in Boston?

A: Harvard.

They make you draw it out of them. I have found at least three types of people that respond in this manner:

1 - The person that was raised elite since birth and really doesn't care at all what you think about him. So him dragging it out is him avoiding the question and hoping you'll learn not to pry.

2 - The person that is tired of being identified with this standard questioning. So him dragging it out is somewhere in the middle. He can use it to his advantage when needed but for the most part doesn't want to be identified in this way.

3 - The snob.
And Pasteur's classic, "Chance favors the prepared mind."
Perhaps he's senile or perhaps he's too old to care about effects of his words on his career (like all the other biologists).
Wow I've been looking for a library like HAMPI for a long time.

Serendipity at its finest.
Maximize Your Language Learning through TPR
Only if fun is your goal. Otherwise, smart and hard win.
A couple of observations.

One, Apple originally proposed that developers write web-based apps for the iPhone, because there was no SDK. There was no explosion of apps that day. The explosion came with the SDK and the App Store.

Two, games are a huge percentage of apps, and while some games can run in a browser, many of the best will not. It's a combination of processing power, control, and "bare metal" (like it or not, a browser is a huge abstraction layer that is not good for games).

So I don't doubt they can create some app market by pushing in this direction, but aren't they missing the clues that have been left for them already?
ad hominem arguments detract from this discussion, i think :)

plus, the blogger is still a student, so of course he's not going to have much in terms of real-world accomplishments.
That was exactly my point. I want to be able to work by my own schedule (with reasonable overlap with the team) and still build a great product. What I feel is that companies (or atleast mine) aren't structured this way.
HowTo: Implementor's guide to rssCloud
Do you have guess as to whether pypy will be production ready faster than unladen-swallow?
However, this is prone to being truncated by sites / software that only allows or uses the first 8 characters...

Another method that I have used in the past is leet-speak (oh look at me, aren't I cool - cough, cough), so I just used my name and converted it: Haitsma became H41t5m4, very similar to a random string, yet very memorable (depending on your interpretation of leet-speak, of course)
I do have VPN access, its just for after hours work though :-\

Does your company have a policy to let people work from home as long as they are productive, or did you have some convincing to do?
'Open internet' rules criticised
I'm reminded of programming, and how code comments don't always describe what the code does. Trying something really is often the only way to know if it does what you want.

So perhaps Apple should have a "try" feature: to download something you have to "pay" for it, but you have a short grace period (say, 10 minutes) in which to decide to completely "scrap" the application. If you scrap it, you aren't charged for it, and you can never use it again. This allows people to never be fooled into paying for something they discover they don't like.
I don't get the hate for this. Caterina has worked hard before, and she's not slagging on it.

What she is saying is that working hard may not be necessary, and certainly is not sufficient. Anyone who invests in startups knows that she's right: the market is the most important. Getting to product/market fit is important. The first you can't control at all; the second may not take forever/a ton of effort if you really understand the market.

Working hard, in this construct, is essentially just "keep trying new things until you get to product/market fit". Sure, in that case, working harder means you get to try more things in any given period of hours/days/weeks/months.

But if you're in the wrong market, or you can't get to product/market fit, no amount of hard work will lead to success.
The number of articles and editorials I've read in the last 5 years, written by people from tier-1 schools, decrying the tyranny and ill-manners of the unwashed masses, and the unfairness towards graduates of these so-called "top" schools, is enough to convince me that the reputation that grads from these schools have for being pompous windbags who went to these schools not for the education, but for the name brand, is well deserved.

This article (hosted not insignificantly at standford.edu) is an absolutely textbook example of this phenomenon.

Articles like this one, and numerous professional interactions with people who introduce themselves as "Suzy Sue, I went to Yale" or "Marcus Markk, I went to Harvard"...and then repeatedly fail to perform up to the expectations I'd have for community college dropouts...I've never heard somebody from a tier-2 or 3 school introduce themselves in this way.

After so many of these kinds of experiences, when I hire people, a degree from a tier-1 school is an automatic mark against, not a mark for.
>What's the motivation for writing the article?
Well, he managed to name-drop Stanford, MIT and Google in a short article with the nutritional value of cardboard. Everyone knows that after the first job or two flashing a ivy-league CV around it starts to matter what you have achieved not where you went.